A grasshopper is a jumping insect with long back legs that chirps by rubbing its legs or wings together, while a locust is a swarming grasshopper that devastates crops and vegetation in huge numbers. Memory hook: a locust is a grasshopper gone plague-mode — it is the swarming that earns the name.
The core difference
Locust and grasshopper both name the same kind of jumping insect, but locust is reserved for the swarming, crop-destroying form.
- grasshopper — a jumping insect with long back legs that chirps: A grasshopper leapt out of the tall grass as we walked by.
- locust — a swarming grasshopper that devastates crops in huge numbers: A cloud of locusts stripped the fields bare within hours.
How to tell them apart
The two words describe overlapping insects rather than two unrelated ones. A grasshopper is the general, everyday name for the chirping insect found in summer fields, while a locust is specifically the swarming kind, notorious for stripping crops bare and appearing in accounts such as the plagues that struck ancient Egypt.
The mix-up usually surfaces in writing about pests or history, where locust carries a sense of scale and destruction that plain grasshopper does not. Confusingly, locust is also the name of the carob tree and its edible pod, unrelated to the insect beyond a shared resemblance in shape.
