louse

Any of numerous small, flat-bodied, wingless biting or sucking insects of the order Phthiraptera, which live as external parasites on birds and mammals, including humans. The lice are sometimes classified together with the psocids in the order Psocodea.

A mean or despicable person.

To bungle. Often used with up.

To clean from lice.

A Middle English variant of loose.

An insect or other small arthropod (as a crustacean) that infests other animals or plants, or an animal resembling such parasites: a name for a great variety of small creatures.

Bird-lice are parasitic insects, of several hundred species, various genera, and several families, which some authors range with the foregoing in the order Hemiptera, but most place in the Pseudoneuroptera. They are known as the order or superfamily Mallophaga. They have mandibulate or biting mouth-parts, are wingless, and of very variable forms. They are by no means confined to birds, but infest mammals as well; almost every kind of bird and beast is infested by these creatures, sometimes several species to one host, and in such multitudes as to canse disease and death. Of these, such as infest domestic quadrupeds and birds belong to the genera Trichodectes, Docophorus, Nirmus, Goniocotes, Goniodes, Lipeurus, Trinotum, Colpopocephalum, Menopon, and Gyropus.

The beaver harbors a remarkable louse, Platypsyllus castoris, a degraded clavicorn beetle, so peculiar as to have been made type of an order, Achreioptera.

Insects have their own lice. Such are the bee-lice, or pupiparous dipterous insects of the family Braulidæ, order Diptera; and some of the lice of bats are similar dipterous insects, though wingless, of the family Nycteribiidæ. Bees, wasps, etc., are also infested by certain small parasitic heteromerous beetles in the form of lice, such as the wingless larvæ of Meloidæ, a species of which has been named Pediculus melittæ, and the whole family Stylopidæ. Insects affected by the latter are said to be stylopized. None of the foregoing lice are aquatic.

Fishes, marine mammals. crustaceans, etc., are infested by a great variety of small degraded crustaceans, collectively known as fish-lice or Ichthyophthira. Most of these belong to a class or order Epizoa or Siphonostoma, or Lernæoidea; a few are cirripeds, as Rhizocephala. Whale-lice are Cyamidæ. Carpice are Argulidæ.