Mantis

How to spell mantis

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mantis

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mantis mean?

1. nounA predatory insect with long folded front legs, often called a praying mantis.

Mantis in a sentence

• A green mantis clung motionless to the stem, waiting for a passing fly.

• The documentary showed a mantis seizing a moth with its spiked forelegs.

Where does mantis come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes straight from the Greek mantis, which literally meant 'prophet' or 'seer', someone who delivers divine messages. The Greeks gave the insect this name because, when it rests, it holds its long front legs folded up in front of its body as though it were lifting them in prayer or prophecy. Naturalists adopted the Greek term directly into scientific Latin in the eighteenth century, and the everyday English name 'praying mantis' simply spells out that same image. The very same root survives in 'necromancy', the supposed practice of telling the future by consulting the dead, where the '-mancy' part carries the prophecy sense. Because English borrowed the spelling whole and never reshaped it, the trap is mainly the unstressed ending, which sounds like '-tiss' but is written '-tis'.

How the word is built

• mantis (from Greek mantis: prophet, seer), used unchanged as the English noun