Worm-eaten

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of fruit or other food, eaten by worms, especially having a worm inside.

    "Once upon a time there was a lad, who went along a road cracking nuts. He happened to find one which was worm-eaten, and shortly afterwards he met the devil."

  2. 2
    Rotten or decrepit. broadly, figuratively
Adjective
  1. 1
    infested with or damaged (as if eaten) by worms wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
badblastedblightedblownflyblownfrowsty

Example

More examples

"On a Thursday morning at the state Hall of Records in Annapolis, Maryland, about 60 kilometers east of Washington, D.C., a dozen or so people were in the microfilm room, looking at photocopies of land deeds, tax rolls, and church records dating back to the 1630s, when Maryland was first founded as a British colony. Another 10–15 people were in the main hall, carefully transcribing documents often worm-eaten and brittle with age, the words within them sometimes grossly misspelled."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.