cockchafer

From cock (“male bird”) +‎ chafer (“beetle”). The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that the name may relate to a resemblance of antennae to coxcomb, or to the beetle’s size.[1] Compare French hanneton (“cockchafer”), ultimately from Frankish *hano (“rooster”). Attested from the late seventeenth century.[1]

• IPA^(key): /ˈkɒkˌt͡ʃeɪfɚ/

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Northern or forest cockchafer, Melolontha hippocastani

cockchafer (plural cockchafers)

1. Any of the large European beetles from the genus Melolontha that are destructive to vegetation.
   • 1793, “Premiums offered by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, in the year MDCCLXXXVI”, in Transactions of the Society Instituted at London, for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce‎, volume 4, page 294:

     To the person who shall discover to the Society an effectual method, verified by repeated and satisfactory trials, of destroying the Grub of the Cockchafer, so destructive to the roots of all sorts of Corn, Pease, Beans, and Turneps, the gold medal.

   • 1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 250:

     His impassioned words buzzed about my ears like cockchafers round the top of the lime-trees.

   • 1927, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex‎, volume 2:

     With regard to the playing of the female part by the weaker rats it is interesting to observe that Féré found among insects that the passive part in homosexual relations is favored by fatigue; among cockchafers it was the male just separated from the female who would take the passive part (on the rare occasions when homosexual relations occurred) with a fresh male.

2. Any of various other similar beetles, such as of the genera Acrossidius, Cyphochilus, Rhopaea, etc.

• May bug, doodlebug

• black-headed pasture cockchafer, Acrossidius tasmaniae
• brown cockchafer, Rhopaea magnicornis
• common cockchafer, Melolontha melolontha
• forest cockchafer, Melolontha hippocastani
• large cockchafer, Melolontha pectoralis
• large white cockchafer, Cyphochilus apicalis