Perhaps Webster was on to something in his choice of words. A student closely attached to books, or addicted to study also, a reader without judgment. He saw the bookworm as being 'attached to books' and, explicitly, 'addicted to study.' He also questioned the bookworm's taste-according to Webster, a bookworm was addicted to the act of reading, and didn't necessarily care what was read (a bookworm was exactly the sort of person who might, for example, read the dictionary).īOOKWORM, n. When it came around to defining bookworm, Noah Webster-from the lexicographer's objective lens-did not see the societal worm but a person with an addiction to reading. Needless to say, the self-absorbed, idle bookworm was not esteemed in a society based on one's gains and accomplishments. Your uncle is a very good man, but he does not make his house pleasant and I have, lately, been very much afraid that he should convert you into a mere bookworm. Rather, the sense of worm being used is the one applied to a human being who is an object of contempt, and since Elizabethan times, the human bookworm has been looked upon with varying degrees of disapproval.ġ7th-century dramatist Ben Jonson, for example, wrote of a 'whore-son bookworm,' and in a 1717 letter describing his arrival at Oxford, poet Alexander Pope confessed to wanting 'nothing but a black Gown and a Salary, to be as meer a Bookworm as any there.' In his novel Pelham, Edward Bulwer-Lytton confirms that the disdain for the bookworm was carried into the 19th century: The worm in that epithet for the constant reader does not refer to larvae or the earthworm, as some children's library posters might have you believe, and does not allude to the figurative devouring of books. The figurative bookworm began its career as an insult, a wholly negative term for someone who reads too much. The sole bookworm today is the human bookworm-and the way the word is used has changed over time. If you happen to hear an entomologist referring to book lice, he or she is talking about another bug altogether. Nowadays no one is likely to refer to any of these larvae as bookworms, least of all entomologists. The term still carries a tinge of disapproval-who wants to be called a worm?-but is widely considered to be more positive than it once was. Originally, 'bookworm' was an entirely negative term: 'worm' was an Elizabethan insult that meant 'wretch,' and to be called a 'bookworm' was an insult.

Bookworm definition