: a large family of Homoptera comprising small soft-bodied plant lice that are usually somewhat pear-shaped with wings if present held vertically over the back when at rest, well-developed antennae, and a pair of prominent wax-secreting cornicles on the posterior part of the abdomen from which the covering of white waxy filaments typical of many species is produced and that have a complex life cycle in which resistant fertilized eggs produced in the fall hatch out parthenogenetic females in the spring that give birth to repeated generations of winged or wingless parthenogenetic females on the same or other kinds of host plants, finally producing a generation of winged males and winged or wingless females that mate and produce the fertilized eggs
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Merriam-Webster unabridged
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