sphexish.
Of animal behaviour: deterministic, preprogrammed.
Meaning & usage
Of animal behaviour: deterministic, preprogrammed.
Where this word comes from
From sphex (“sand wasp of Sphex or an allied genus”) + -ish (suffix meaning ‘being like, similar to, typical of’), coined by the American scientist and scholar of comparative literature Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) in a September 1982 “Metamagical Themas” column in Scientific American, after a study of the behaviour of sphexide wasps. Sphex is derived from Ancient Greek σφήξ (sphḗx, “wasp”), either from Proto-Indo-European *bʰey- (“bee”) or a Pre-Greek word.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.