Worm

How to spell worm

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce worm

What does worm mean?

1. nounA small, soft-bodied, legless invertebrate with a long slender body, such as an earthworm.
2. verbTo move or progress by crawling, twisting, or persistent effort, or to extract something gradually.
3. nounA self-replicating malicious program that spreads itself across computers and networks.

Worm in a sentence

• noun

  The gardener turned the soil and found a fat worm near the roots.

• verb

  She had to worm her way through the crowded train carriage to reach the door.

• noun

  The security team isolated the worm before it could spread across the office network.

• noun

  A robin tugged a worm from the wet lawn at dawn.

• verb

  The detective tried to worm a confession out of the nervous suspect.

• noun

  An email attachment carried a worm that infected thousands of machines overnight.

Where does worm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word that comes from the Old English wyrm, which originally meant 'serpent', 'snake', or even 'dragon' rather than the small creature we picture today. It traces back to a common Germanic ancestor, also seen in the German Wurm and the Old Norse ormr, and ultimately to an Indo-European root meaning 'to turn' or 'to twist', a fitting description of how these creatures move. Over the medieval period the sense narrowed from large mythical serpents to the humble crawling invertebrates of the soil, although the old grand meaning survives in literary phrases about dragons. The spelling kept the older 'wor' arrangement even though the vowel now sounds like 'wer', which is the small trap for writers. In modern use it has also stretched to cover self-replicating computer programs that crawl through networks, a metaphor that reaches straight back to the wriggling original.

How the word is built

• worm (single Old English root wyrm: serpent, dragon; no affixes)