earwig [OE] Earwigs have nothing to do with wigs. The -wig bit is related to wiggle, which makes a lot more sense. It was once thought that the insect crawled into people’s ears, and the same idea is found in other languages: in French an earwig is a perce-oreilles, literally ‘ear-piercer’, and in German it is Ohrwurm, or ‘ear worm’. Earworm was also used in English for an earwig from the late 16th century. The Germans also used Ohrwurm as a term for those irritating snatches of music that go round and round in your head, and earworm has been used in this sense in English since the 1980s. These tunes are also called sticky tunes in English, or a cognitive itch, while the Brazilians call them chiclete de ouvido or ‘ear chewing gum’.