Recent advances in ontology development by other research communities (e.g., the Gene Ontology project, FlyBase ontology) underscore the importance of utilizing controlled, explicit vocabularies to facilitate communication between researchers and databases. The hymenopterist community (and specialists on other taxa) will benefit from a comprehensive treatment of morphological terminology, complete with new and old synonyms, relationships to other "parts", verbal definitions, and illustrations. Examples of terminological conflicts, historical and taxonomic artifacts, and implementation of a morphological ontology in databases like MorphBank are discussed.