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worm

Pronunciation: /wɜːm/

The English word “worm” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A generally tubular invertebrate of the annelid phylum; an earthworm.
  2. More loosely, any of various tubular invertebrates resembling annelids but not closely related to them, such as velvet worms, acorn worms, flatworms, or roundworms. See Appendix:English worms.
  3. Any creeping or crawling animal, such as a snake (cf. “dragon”; blindworm, slowworm, “legless lizard”), snail, or caterpillar.
  4. A maggot or any other insect larva with similar shape and behavior.
  5. A dragon, today especially Germanic dragon, more often of the serpentine or wingless type, for example sea serpent, but also any kind of dragon.
  6. Either a mythical "dragon" (especially wingless), a gigantic sea serpent, or a creature that resembles a Mongolian death worm.
  7. A contemptible or devious being.
  8. A self-replicating program that propagates through a network by copying itself, differing from a virus which seeks to propagate by inserting its code into other executable files.
  9. A graphical representation of the total runs scored across a number of overs.
  10. Anything helical, especially the thread of a screw.
  11. A spiral instrument or screw, often like a double corkscrew, used for drawing balls from firearms.
  12. The spiral wire of a corkscrew.
  13. A muscular band in the tongue of some animals, such as dogs; the lytta.
  14. The condensing tube of a still, often curved and wound to save space.
  15. A short revolving screw whose threads drive, or are driven by, a worm wheel or rack by gearing into its teeth.
  16. An internal tormentor; something that gnaws or afflicts one’s mind with remorse.
  17. A strip of linked tiles sharing parallel edges in a tiling.
  18. The lytta.
  19. A dance, or dance move, in which the dancer lies on the floor and undulates the body horizontally thereby moving forwards.

verb

  1. To make (one's way) with a crawling motion.

Etymology

From Middle English werm, wirm, worm, worme, wrim, wurm, wyrm, wyrme, from Old English weorm, wurm, wyrm, from Proto-West Germanic *wurmi, from Proto-Germanic *wurmiz (“worm; snake”), from Proto-Indo-European *wr̥mis (“worm; larva”), possibly from *wer- (“to turn”). Doublet of vermin and wyrm, the latter of which is a fairly recent borrowing directly from the Old English. (computing): First…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.