How to Use mouthpart in a Sentence

mouthpart

noun
  • Twisting or jerking can cause the mouthparts to break off and remain in the skin.
    — Lisa Haney, Fox News, 2017-07-07
  • Now the fate of these trees—and our ability to defend them—rests in the mouthparts of a tiny gray moth.
    — Sam Schipani, Smithsonian, 2017-08-10
  • Perhaps most weirdly, though, the feeding mouthparts remain down at the base of the neck.
    — Matt Simon, WIRED, 2014-12-19
  • The adult female beetle lays her eggs in the far end of the twig, then uses her very sharp mouthparts to score the small branch around and around.
    — Neil Sperry, star-telegram, 2017-10-20
  • A tick’s entire life is the rapacious search for a living being to sink its mouthparts into.
    — Dave Taft, New York Times, 2017-06-08
  • Mosquitoes use heat sensors around their mouthparts to detect the warmth of your body. 19.
    — Karen Farkas, cleveland.com, 2017-05-17
  • Along with anal drumming and scraping, the caterpillars vibrate via their mouthparts, either by drumming or scraping them from side to side on the leaf.
    — Mary Bates, National Geographic, 2016-04-05
  • Their mouthparts bruise then suck sap from the foliage of flowering plants, trees, evergreens, roses and shrubs, vegetables and houseplants.
    — Betty Cahill, The Denver Post, 2019-06-24
  • Because moths had already developed strawlike mouthparts, one group was able to exploit the novel food source, and evolved into butterflies.
    — Sarah Todd, Quartz at Work, 2019-10-23
  • Scales Adult females look like hard or soft bumps on stems, leaves, or fruit; males are minute flying insects and larvae are tiny, soft, crawling insects with threadlike mouthparts.
    — The Editors, Good Housekeeping, 2018-07-10
  • Known as an assassin bug, Sycanus uses its mouthpart to stab its insect prey, including the fire caterpillar, one of the most important pests of oil palm trees.
    — Dyna Rochmyaningsih, Science | AAAS, 2019-07-11
  • But the sensation is uniquely tactile, not at all unpleasant, as thousands of soft, plump grubs, each the size of a grain of rice, wriggle against your skin, tiny mouthparts gently poking your flesh.
    — Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post, 2019-07-03
  • Once the plant surface is covered, insects have a really difficult time inserting either their mouthparts or ovipositors into the plants to do damage.
    — Sally McCabe, Philly.com, 2017-06-16
  • Technically speaking, bugs are not synonymous with insects but are a subset of them: those which possess mouthparts that pierce and suck (as opposed to, say, caterpillars and termites, whose mouths are built, like ours, to chew).
    — Steven Strogatz, The New Yorker, 2011-08-08

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'mouthpart.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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