Friday Fun Facts
Origin of Bookworm
Anyone who’d prefer to read a book at a party, park, in your room, or, well, anywhere really, is usually referred to as a bookworm. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest documented appearance of the word ‘bookworm’ is 1580. The word appears in correspondences between scholar Gabriel Harvey and poet Edmund Spenser. One of the men referred to someone who reads too much as, “A morning bookeworm, an afternoone maltworm.” Other names for ‘bookworm’ include ‘ink drinker’ (French), ‘reading horse’ (Danish), ‘read-rat’ (German), ‘book flea’ (Indonesian), and ‘library mouse’ (Romanian), among many others.
