Every insect on this page is exactly 6 letters long — full profile for each.
Looking for 6-letter insects? Here are 13 insects that fit — each linked to a full profile.
Letters are counted across the whole name with spaces, hyphens, apostrophes, and diacritics excluded. "Apple Pie" is 8 letters; "Boeuf Bourguignon" is 16.
A small reddish-brown blood-feeding insect that hides in mattresses and furniture by day, emerging at night to feed on sleeping humans — making a global comeback since the 2000s after near-eradication in the mid-20th century.
A large, hard-shelled beetle whose males sport antler-like mandibles used for ritualized combat over females, a member of the most species-rich animal order on Earth.
Large, clumsy, nocturnal beetles that blunder noisily into windows and lights on warm summer evenings — the adults are harmless leaf-grazers but the larvae (white C-shaped grubs) live in soil for 3–4 years eating plant roots, damaging lawns and crops; badgers and rooks dig up turf to find them.
A loud-singing insect spending 13 or 17 years underground as a nymph before emerging in massive synchronized broods to mate and die within weeks.
A nocturnal insect with prominent rear pincers and a famous (false) reputation for crawling into human ears, an attentive mother to its eggs and young.
A large social wasp with a particularly painful sting — including the European hornet that builds paper nests in tree hollows and the notorious Asian giant hornet, the "murder hornet" that decimates honeybee colonies.
A grasshopper that has transformed into the swarming phase — physiologically distinct from its solitary form, capable of forming billion-strong swarms that devastate agriculture across continents.
A predatory insect with raptorial forelegs held in a "praying" posture, capable of swiveling its triangular head 180° and famous for the female's occasional sexual cannibalism.
Aquatic insects with brief winged adult lives — some species live just 24 hours, with massive synchronized emergences sometimes blanketing entire towns and serving as the model for fly fishing imitation flies.
A dragonfly-like insect with massive owl-like compound eyes and clubbed antennae, related to lacewings, that hunts mosquitoes and small flying insects on the wing at dusk.
A regional Northeastern U.S. name for tiny biting midges, especially common in coastal Maine and the Maritime provinces — small enough to bite through screens and disproportionately painful for their size.
An eight-legged predatory arachnid (technically not an insect but commonly grouped with them) — over 50,000 species worldwide, with prey-capture techniques ranging from web-building to ambush, jumping, lassoing, and net-casting.
A beetle with a distinctive elongated snout — among the largest insect families with over 95,000 species, including notorious agricultural pests of grain, cotton, fruit, and bark.
That's our current list of insects with exactly 6 letters. Need a different length? Try the browse-by-length pills in the sidebar, or combine with a starting letter — for example, 6-letter insects that start with A.