Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various parasitic and nonparasitic worms of the phylum Platyhelminthes, such as a tapeworm or a planarian, characteristically having a soft, flat, bilaterally symmetrical body and no body cavity.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A platyhelminth; one of the Platyhelminthes, as a tapeworm: a name applied to animals of the planarian group. See cut under Dendrocæla.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) Any worm belonging to the Platyhelminthes; also, sometimes applied to the planarians.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of very many parasitic or free-living worms, of the phylum Platyhelminthes, having a flattened body with no skeleton or body cavity.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun parasitic or free-living worms having a flattened body

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Or of the Spirometra mansoni, commonly called a flatworm, which can grow up to fourteen inches long and take up residence in your brain, where it feeds upon your cerebral matter until you are reduced to a vegetative state?

    The Monstrumologist William James Henry 2009

  • Or of the Spirometra mansoni, commonly called a flatworm, which can grow up to fourteen inches long and take up residence in your brain, where it feeds upon your cerebral matter until you are reduced to a vegetative state?

    The Monstrumologist William James Henry 2009

  • The flatworm is the simplest living multicellular animal to have bilateral symmetry, and its primeval ancestors must have been the first to develop this.

    The Human Brain Asimov, Isaac 1963

  • The color of the flatworm is a very dark brown and the stomach with a thin pale line.

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] 2009

  • Schistosomiasis is caused by the larvae of a flatworm which is released into water by infected snails.

    Medical Recommendations for Travel in Cambodia 2008

  • Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours.

    Archive 2009-01-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • The study also concluded that the combination of atrazine and phosphate--widely used in fertilizer for corn and sorghum production--significantly increased the presence of the flatworm; and

    Andrew Wetzler: Follow the Evidence and Save the Frogs Andrew Wetzler 2011

  • Another study, which found that atrazine is a strong predictor of parasitic flatworm larvae in frogs, which can cause severe limb deformities and kidney damage to amphibians, including in declining populations of northern leopard frogs.

    Andrew Wetzler: Follow the Evidence and Save the Frogs Andrew Wetzler 2011

  • Nautilus ... has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.

    Archive 2009-01-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye.

    Archive 2009-01-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

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