Illustrative Context

There's an ant climbing up your leg.

Target Sense

• General IE-CoR policy is to favour basic, default terms, rather than technical, scientific ones (from biology in this case). So although technically, in biological classification, ants and termites are quite distinct families, what matters to IE-CoR is that popular usage often does not distinguish them in practice (and focuses instead on their similar form and behaviour as colony insects).

• So for this IE-CoR meaning too, provide the most default term in your language:

  • If the default term covers both ants and termites, then select that term. This is effectively the case in English, for example, where most speakers take ant as a hypernym, and termite as a hyponym within it (irrespective of the techincal, biolgical classification). So the correct IE-CoR term in English is indeed ant. Many European languages are similar in this respect.
  • If your language has no such cover term, but has two distincI, non-overlapping lexemes for ant vs. termite, then please select whichever of those is perceived as the more basic, default or common term in your language, whichever of ants or termites it technically refers to.
  • Only if you really cannot choose between two equally basic terms, then select the one that refers to the technical ant (i.e. of the family Formicidae) rather than termite.

• If your language uses by default a term in the plural, or a non-count noun, enter that default form, and mention this in the notes field.