They have mouthparts adapted for chewing and are mostly found under bark, in dry wood or in leaf litter.

[1] The name Zoraptera, given by Filippo Silvestri in 1913,[2] is misnamed and potentially misleading: "zor" is Greek for pure and "aptera" means wingless.

The members of this order are small insects, 3 millimetres (0.12 in) or less in length, that resemble termites in appearance and in their gregarious behavior.

A few females and even fewer males are in the alate form with relatively large membranous wings that can be shed at a basal fracture line.

[3] Under good conditions the blind and wingless form predominates, but if their surroundings become too tough, they produce offspring which develop into winged adults with eyes.

At present the best supported position based on morphological traits recognizes the Zoraptera as polyneopterous insects related to the webspinners of the order Embioptera.

[6][7][8][9][10] The following cladogram, based on the molecular phylogeny of Wipfler et al. 2019, places Zoraptera as the sister group of Dermaptera (earwigs); Zoraptera and Dermaptera together form the sister group of the remaining Polyneoptera:[11] Zoraptera (angel insects) Dermaptera (earwigs) Plecoptera (stoneflies) Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, katydids) Grylloblattodea (ice crawlers) Mantophasmatodea (gladiators) Phasmatodea (stick insects) Embioptera (webspinners) Mantodea (mantises) Blattodea (cockroaches and termites) The Zoraptera are currently divided into two families, four subfamilies, nine genera and a total of 51 species, some of which have not been yet described.

[21][22] Latinozoros barberi lack such a dominance structure but display complex courtship behavior including nuptial feeding.

[18] In Spermozoros impolitus, copulation does not occur, but fertilization is accomplished instead by transfer of a spermatophore from the male to the female.

It is thought that this large sperm cell prevents fertilization by other males, by physically blocking the female's genital tract.