The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Worms and their Turnings

Worms have a hard time. When not being chased about by early birds or being disturbed in their can, they get trodden on. It’s no surprise that Shakespeare records them fighting back against their oppressors:

William Blake, on the other hand, claimed that ‘The cut worm forgives the plow’, which seems extraordinarily unlikely.

Etymologically, it’s hardly surprising that worms turn. Worm comes from the Proto-Indo-European wer, meaning turn, a reference to their bendiness. So a worm turning is not just appropriate, it’s a tautology.

Worms have come a long way down in the world, as the word worm used to mean dragon. Then from a huge firebreathing monster they became mere snakes, and slowly they declined until they became the little things in your garden being chased around by a blackbird (or sliced up by William Blake). However, the dragon-meaning survived for centuries, and as late as 1867 William Morris could still write the wonderful line, ‘Therewith began a fearful battle twixt worm and man’, with a straight face.

The one constant in the etymological journey of the worm is that man doesn’t like worms and worms don’t like men. For a long time it was believed that garden worms could crawl into your ear, and as the Old English wicga could also mean worm, we get the strange modern formation earwig, even though an earwig is technically not a worm but an insect and has nothing to do with the sort of wig you wear on your head.[21]

There are only two places where worms have turned and maintained some of their former greatness. One is a wormhole, which used to mean exactly what you might expect until 1957 when the word was hijacked by the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a theoretical connection between two parts of space-time implied, if not necessitated, by the Theory of Relativity.

The other is the fearsome crocodile, whose name comes from the Greek kroke-drilos, which means pebble-worm. Pebbles also play a crucial part in calculus, which means pebble.