Sandworm

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A huge fictional burrowing creature resembling a worm that lives in desert sands ; a real burrowing worm that inhabits sand or mud and feeds on debris
2. An enormous wormlike monster that tunnels beneath desert dunes in imaginative stories ; a small segmented worm that burrows through sandy or muddy ground
3. A colossal serpentine beast that moves through arid sand in science fiction ; any worm that makes its home burrowing within sand or silt

Etymology: Sandworm is a plain compound: "sand" plus "worm," both native English words with roots reaching back to Old English. Its surprising twist is that "worm" originally meant any creeping or crawling creature, including snakes and dragons, long before it narrowed to the soft, segmented animal of the garden. That broader sense explains why a sandworm can be a creature of any size. The word has its best-known life in fiction. Frank Herbert's science fiction novel "Dune" made the sandworm a towering, desert-dwelling giant that produces the spice melange, and the image has become so familiar that many readers now picture it before they think of any real burrowing animal. Earlier, the term already named real invertebrates that live in sand, such as lugworms and other marine worms that build burrows in sandy seabeds.