Definitions

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  • noun Plural form of emmet.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • A quarter of Britons thought the Cornish word for tourists -- "emmets" -- came from Spain or Greece, with a fifth of respondents thinking the Yorkshire term for a silly person - "a daft ha-porth" -- was a Danish or Polish phrase.

    timesofmalta.com 2008

  • Here is Erasmus Darwin linking you and me intimately to ants (which he calls "emmets") and worms:

    The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature 2001

  • They were ants, but of a very much larger species than the little red-and-black "emmets" which exist in the meadows.

    Nature Near London Richard Jefferies 1867

  • League or the Keep Cornwall Whole group are mainly "emmets", or incomers ("A river runs through it ..."

    The Independent - Frontpage RSS Feed 2010

  • They devoured many of their foes, and these also slew many of the ants; but help came to the emmets: now an ant would go up to an ape and smite him and cut him in twain, whilst ten apes could hardly master one ant and bear him away and tear him in sunder.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • Ants, alluding to some obscure myth which gave rise to the gold-diggers of Herodotus and other classics, “emmets in size somewhat less than dogs but bigger than foxes.”

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • When the emmets espied Janshah they pushed on and surrounded him, and one of the slaves fell to smiting them with his sword and cutting them in twain; whereupon the whole host set upon him and slew him.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • The sore battle lasted till the evening but the emmets were victorious.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • Our villages are like molehills, and men as so many emmets, busy, busy still, going to and fro, in and out, and crossing one another's projects, as the lines of several sea-cards cut each other in a globe or map.

    Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

  • But is it not the most absurd of all extravagances to imagine that the Infinite Supreme should, in favor of three or four hundred emmets on this little heap of earth, derange the operation of the vast machinery that moves the universe?

    A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

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