the.com/earworm
A song that moved into your skull and never signed a lease.
means A catchy tune or melody fragment that gets stuck in your head, replaying involuntarily over and over.
from A direct, fairly recent translation of the German 'Ohrwurm' (ear + worm), which itself originally referred to an actual earwig, the insect once mythically (and wrongly) believed to crawl into ears. The musical sense — something burrowing into your mind and staying lodged there — caught on in German before English borrowed the term almost intact in the late 20th century.
- official term
- involuntary musical imagery, coined by psychologists
- usual suspects
- simple, repetitive, slightly unpredictable melodies stick hardest
- cure
- finishing the song or chewing gum often stops it
- who gets them
- musicians get earworms more often than anyone else