Definition of "culex" [cu•lex]

• Any of various mosquitoes of the genus Culex, which includes the common house mosquito (C. pipiens). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "And at the last when Barnabas came to Rome preaching the faith of Jesu Christ, the philosophers mocked him as he had been mad or out of his wits, and, as some say, Clement was the first philosopher that mocked him and despised his predication, and in scorn put to him this question, saying: What is the cause that culex, which is a little beast, hath six feet and two wings, and an elephant which is a great beast hath but four feet and no wings?"
• "The goal of this abatement crew near Chicago is to prevent larvae from growing into adult mosquitoes, specifically the culex pipians, the common carrier of West Nile virus that infected more than 4,000 people in the U.S. last year."
• "Nothing could have seemed less useful than the study of mosquitoes, the differentiation of the different species, their mode of life, etc., and yet without this knowledge discoveries so beneficial and of such far-reaching importance to the whole human race as that of the cause and mode of transmission of malaria and yellow fever would have been impossible; for it could easily have been shown that the ordinary _culex_ mosquito played no rôle."