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Wiktionary
earworm

n. A tune that is stuck in one's head, especially as unwanted or repetitive.

WordNet
Wikipedia
Earworm

An earworm, sometimes known as a brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome, is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing. Phrases used to describe an earworm include "musical imagery repetition", "involuntary musical imagery", and "stuck song syndrome". The word earworm is a calque from the German . The earliest known usage is in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway.

Researchers who have studied and written about the phenomenon include Theodor Reik, Sean Bennett, Oliver Sacks, Daniel Levitin, James Kellaris, Philip Beaman, Vicky Williamson, and, in a more theoretical perspective, Peter Szendy. The phenomenon is common and should not be confused with palinacousis, a rare medical condition caused by damage to the temporal lobe of the brain that results in auditory hallucinations.

Earworm (disambiguation)

An earworm is a piece of music that repeats compulsively within one's mind.

Earworm may also refer to:

  • Earworm Records, a British record label
  • DJ Earworm, an American mashup artist
  • "Earworm", an episode in Season 7 of SpongeBob SquarePants

Usage examples of "earworm".

But different species can kill as many as two hundred kinds of pests, mostly caterpillars, like armyworms, cutworms, corn earworms, moths, leafworms and bollworms.

One is called the native budworm and the other, the corn earworm or the cotton bollworm - a good rowdy name for this pest.

A number of parasitic wasps will attack earworms, and green lacewings make excellent predators too.

The corn earworm moth, whose hungry larvae can decimate an otherwise healthy crop, has antennae tuned to these as well as other specific frequencies, with the result that when the female flies about on a clear moonlit night, she 'sees' - through her antennae - the whole field lit up, like an array of a myriad natural light bulbs.

The director of the county extension office must have rattled off two dozen possibilities, including the corn borer, corn earworm, corn weevil, corn beetle, corn-root aphid, and a very common parasitic fungus called corn smut.

Ethan had expected a worm: earthworm, corn earworm, cutworm, leech, caterpillar, trematode, one type of worm or another.