A dragonfly is a long, thin insect with two pairs of clear wings and often a bright body. It lives near ponds, lakes and slow rivers, and it hunts smaller insects in the air. It can hover, then shoot off very fast, which is why people notice it. The English name is simply dragon plus fly: it looked, to earlier speakers, a little like a tiny flying dragon — though actually it is just an insect, not a baby dragon at all. Fly here is the old word for a flying insect, as in housefly, not the verb to fly. In everyday talk this is a common nature word; children learn it early. Scientists split dragonflies into many kinds, but most people use one word for the big ones with the long bodies. A close cousin is the damselfly, usually slimmer, which often rests with its wings folded together; dragonflies usually rest with the wings held out. People mix those two up a lot.