Recently, we ran across this great word while perusing a spelling word list and stumbled over its meaning. The ligni- prefix we correctly guessed referred to wood, from the Latin lignum. However, we floundered somewhat with the middle part of the word. The only related word we could think of was perdition, which we thought was where your journey ends if you miss out on a ticket to heaven, or ‘condemned to hell’. The ending is the common English adjectival suffix -ous.
So our amateur linguistic skills led us to conclude ligniperdous means ‘having the properties of condemned wood‘.
At this point, we reached for the dictionaries to discover our assessment was not too far from the mark. Unaccustomed with the theological nuances of perdition, we did not make the final, clinching step of equating ‘condemned to hell’ with ‘dead’ or ‘destroyed’. Indeed, the central morpheme -perd- derives from perdere, Latin for ‘to destroy’.
All our dictionaries offer the same concise definition: wood-destroying (OED)1, that destroys wood (W3)2, and destructive of wood (Chambers)3.
As expected, the OED gives an example of the early use of the word from 1832, by Sir Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, Vol II, 1832: “It is well known also that beetles, and many other kinds of ligniperdous insects, have been introduced into Great Britain in timber; especially several North American species.“ Searching the Internet for additional examples, we found these astounding (and quite haunting) pictures of camponotus ligniperda.
References
1. The Oxford English Dictionary L, p. 282
2. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, p. 1309
3. The Chambers Dictionary 1993, p. 970