Today's Word "Formication"
Published in Vocabulary
formication \form-eh-KEY-shehn\ (noun) - The sensation of ants crawling over the skin.
"I don't know their effect on others but I suffer formication just thinking about oysters."
Latin formicare "to crawl like ants" from formica "ant." The root of "formica" is akin to Greek murmex "ant," Serbian mrav, Russian muravey, and Kurdish merule "ant." The kitchen countertop laminate inherited its name from the original Formica, an electrical insulator that was a replacement for mica. Formicant, the adjective of this family, means "very faint or slow," as in the formicant pulse of a direly sick patient. A place where ants dwell is a formicary "ant nest, hill." It can also replace the phrase "ant farm," which leaves the impression that we expect the ants to germinate in the spring. The verb from which all these variants derive is formicate "to swarm with moving objects."
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