Worm
This article is about animals known as worms. There are also computer worms, and the dragons known as wyrms, sometimes spelt this way. Ringworm, so-called, is a fungous disease of the skin.
A
worm is any of numerous relatively small elongated soft-bodied
invertebrate animals. The most famous is the
earthworm, a member of
phylum Annelida, but there are hundreds of thousands of different
species that live in a wide variety of habitats other than
soil.
Originally, the word referred to any creeping or a crawling animal of any kind or size, such as a serpent, caterpillar, snail, or the like. Later this definition was narrowed to the modern definition which still includes several different animal groups. Major phyla include:
Some other invertebrate groups may be considered worms. Also, many insect
larvae are known as worms, though they are not in a technical sense.