Bearcastle Blog » Earworm Origins

Earworm Origins

Deep down, I'd like to believe that I don't really care that much about priority and doing things first and getting proper credit and all that, but sometimes a matter comes along that is so supremely unimportant, so trivial and petty, that one can get a little irritated. This is one such story, and it concerns the widespread use, in English, of the word "earworm". Pay close attention.
The word would seem to have appeared in the popular lexicon relatively recently, on 29 October 2003, in the article "'Brain itch' keeps songs in the head". I don't know yet whether this is the word's first appearance in the popular English press, but the BBC seems to think that it's pretty new, given the way they describe it. Here's the lead from the article:

Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a "brain itch" that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over.

In Germany, this type of song is known as an "ohrwurm" – an earworm – and typically has a high, upbeat melody and repetitive lyrics that verge between catchy and annoying.

Songs such as the Village People's YMCA, Los Del Rio's Macarena, and the Baha Men's Who Let The Dogs Out owe their success to their ability to create a "cognitive itch," according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration.

The description of the word is basically correct (even if one has issues with the presentation of the "research findings"), and you can easily track the word as it spreads through various blogs whose authors first learned about the idea from this BBC report.
Somewhere along the way, a bit of misinformation crept into the story concerning the provenance of the word. I don't yet know its source, or when the mutation occured, nor at whose hand. Here are a few examples.

This additional "fact", that Prof. Kellaris "coined" the term, has even made its way into the Wikipedia entry for "earworm":

Use of the English translation was introduced by James Kellaris ….

whence the "fact" has begun its spread through the blogoon, as in this example from Buffalo Bandit's Blogtastic Blog:

Potter Earworm
I know what you're thinking, "Earworm?! Ewww, gross! Buffalo Bandit sucks." And while all of that may be true, you aren't thinking of the right definition of the word. According to Wikipedia, an earworm is: […]

The problem with this additional new fact, that Prof. Kellaris "coined" the term (because he's "done so much research on it"?), is that it is not true. Obviously there's a bit of a problem with that idea since, as the first BBC story showed, the word is claimed to come from the German "ohrwurm" (which I haven't yet actually verified), and to be just a literal translation into English. He may have introduced "earworm" into the marketing and psychology literature sometime after "beginning his research in 2000", he may have introduced the term to the english-speaking press, but he did not introduce the term into common and widespread use among English speakers. How do I know?
I know, because I occasionally claim that I did in 1992, although I have now found a trail leading to somewhat earlier citations (which I'll point out further on), although I believe that those earlier usage instances had a limited influence.
Here's my part of the earworm story.
During the period 1992 – 1994, I was an actively posting member of the Usenet newsgroup called "soc.motss" (motss = "members of the same sex", a low-profile name for a gay and lesbian meeting place on line). In the middle of some discussion I made a posting in which I related that I had been introduced to a useful new word to describe those nasty little tunes that get stuck in one's head and refuse to go away: "ear worm". In fact, I even gave the same etymology as the BBC did a decade later. The word had been relayed to me by my partner, Isaac, who said he'd read it in a book and thought it interesting enough to mention it to me, since we both enjoy unusual and odd words.
Fortunately, I don't have to try to recall exactly how all this happened, since (as was pointed out to me by a friend, Chris Ambidge, who has been a devoted fan of the word "earworm" for over a decade), Google groups has archives of soc.motss posts from those days.
Here is the link to a thread in which my initial "ear worm" post appears. Google itself cites this by saying "The earliest google(tm) reference to the phrase 'ear worm' in soc.motss is 1992-12-09". This is me writing — the editorial comments are mine from the original:

I have very little German [which means I may spell it incorrectly, or discover that the meaning is incorrect], but my polyglot bear tells me that the German's have a word for this phenomenon of the mental music which will not stop: "ohrworm" [literally, "ear worm"].

I did, in fact, spell it incorrectly. "Polyglot bear" refers to my partner, Isaac, who first told me about the word and claimed its German origins.
Later on, in what Goodle describes thus: "The earliest google(tm) reference to the word 'earworm' in soc.motss is 1993-03-18" — that is, I used it as a single word rather than a two-word phrase. I had this to say about it:

An ohrwurm is an inscrutible thing–where *do* they come from? Some of them, I've found, correlate with something that I heard on the radio about three days earlier. Some of them are simply stupid tunes that one hears in passing and, blam, one's stuck. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to mention the name of a tune. [I understand that this can even happen with those intricate tunes of Madonna.]

Then there was one morning I can remember when I woke up and my ohrwurm was singing the beginning of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto #1. That's it, just the first 6 bars or so, over and over and over. It was exhilarting for awhile, then it became simply maddening. The only way I could stifle it was to buy a recording, and let it listen to the entire thing. It died a peaceful death; requiescat in pace.

Aside from their notable tenacity, these worms can also be quite clever [if not *intricate*]. I have
known one which could sing the subject of a Bach fugue and then transform it effortlessly into a fragment of a Mahler symphony.

(Quite obviously, earworms are not restricted to particularly simply pop tunes, despite claims to the contrary quoted from the press above. Also, I seem to have anticipated some of Prof. Kellaris' conclusions.) The "subject" line of that post was "Subject: ear worms"; later, the phrase contracted into the single word "earworm".
Google makes two further claims of precendence:

  1. The earliest google(tm) reference to the phrase "ear worm" outside of
    soc.motss is dated 1989-06-23 in rec.music.gaffa. John Precedo wrote "Incidently, there are songs I hear that I HATE, and yet can't stop humming…you've probably heard some like this yourself. According to my sister, the Germans call them "ear worm". That's the trivial fact for today. " Thus adding to the lore that the word is of German origins.
  2. The earliest google(tm) reference to the word "earworm" outside of soc.motss is dated 1993-03-19 in alt.tv.simpsons , which I saw at the time and took naturally to imply that its author was also a reader of soc.motss, although he evidently preferred not to announce the fact.

Now, none of this would be terribly interesting except for the fact that the word "earworm" became quite popular in soc.motss, so commonly used that I sometimes claim (although I haven't verified the claim) that there was always an "earworm" thread running continuously in the newsgroup for at least the next 10 years, such as mentioned in this post by David W. Fenton, from 29 April 2003 (i.e., some 10 years later and, no doubt coincidentally, on the eve of my birthday), or this post by my friend Chris Ambidge who, as you will see in that post, shares my interest in the origins of the word "earworm".
As for its popularity, consider this Google search for the word "earworm", in newsgroups, and restricted to posts just by Mr Ambidge! Google claims there are 78 instances. Searching all groups returns 7,900 instances, including this one by Doug Wyman (a familiar correspondant to me during my tenure in soc.motss) in misc.writing, dated 19 October 2001:

Does anyone have a reasonably documentable source
for the word "earworm"? I first heard it used on
soc.motss.

I was wondering if this is a usenet originated word.
Are usenet specific terms becoming commonplace enough
to use in real world society?

I wonder what percentage of society reads one or more
usenet forums regularly.

Thus, we can see that use of the word "earworm" was already widespread, and even its usage of considerable interest, for quite some time before Prof. Kellaris began his research on the subject.
It's fun to look at the results from that Google search: note the preponderance of its usage in soc.motss, and look at its spread into other groups as the decade progressed from 1993. You'll even note that many people anticipated some of Prof. Kellaris' results by suggesting ways of eliminating particularly pernicious earworms.
Now, to tidy up the citation linkage. Thanks to some interest shown by Guy K. Haas in an another report from the same time as the BBC article that I first saw:

Here, in MSNBC, they report that "James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati" has studied "How unwelcome songs get stuck in our heads — and how to unstick them."
Now, they say that he calls them earworms, as though this was a new label, but this term has been around for years, and is just a translation from the German: "Ohrwurm."

There's that reference to the German origins again! But not so maddening this time, because Mr. Haas is kind enough to track down a citation: he references an article on "earworm" at The Word Spy, which claims the earliest known citation:

But the idea of a tune, a melody, a combination of musical sounds that seems to be on everybody's lips at the same time, that spreads through a society as rapidly as a respiratory infection, and seems to invasively seize and occupy space in peoples minds until they finally succeed inforgetting it, merits a word of its own.

The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with "door worm," where the "w" is pronounced like a "v") to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can't keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means "ear worm" and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl into the ear.
—Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable words," The Whole Earth Review, December 22, 1987

Ta da! At last we have what looks like it might be the original source of the claim to German heritage for "earworm". I think I can leave it here for the moment, before taking up the "ohrwurm" thread.
By the way, this citation describes these tunes as a thing "that spreads through a society as rapidly as a respiratory infection…", which must be the source of that otherwise inscrutable turn of phrase from the Arrowhead Smoke Signal mentioned above: "Earworm is the respiratory infection for music lovers worldwide." Which is odd, since it was the Smoke Signal that claimed "coinage" of "earworm" for Prof. Kellaris, even though it seems evident that the author of that claim had access to the more complete story from Rheingold book. Curious.
It also brings things full circle for me, since Isaac reminds me that he read about "earworm" and "ohrwurm" in "some book" which, we can now be certain, was Howard Rheingold's Untranslatable Words. Sometimes, it's a small linguistic world.
And now, of course, I have so many questions for Prof. Kellaris that deal with our shared fascination with "earworms". It also makes me want to know whether he ever read the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss.
*** Update [23 March 2005]
The BBC article mentioned above caught the eye of at least one actual musician, Scott Spiegelberg, who has written a bit in his blog about "Catchy Tunes".

Posted on March 14, 2005 at 23.48 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Such Language!

11 Responses

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by Di
    on Saturday, 23 April 2005 at 11.28
    Permalink

    I'm currently doing research on the Earworm Phenomenon at Temple University. I've been trying to track down the origin of the "ohrworm". Thank you for your help

  2. Written by Bearcastle Blog
    on Wednesday, 20 July 2005 at 16.41
    Permalink

    Let's Play Internet!

    I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? …

  3. Written by Oliver Searle
    on Tuesday, 23 August 2005 at 06.42
    Permalink

    I was very interested by your research into the topic of the ohrwurm. I am a composer from Scotland, currently writing an orchestral piece entitled "earworm" (for concerts in Europe next summer) and have been familiar with the term for a number of years. I am intrigued as to whether there is a generic sound, which will make something catchy for everyone, or if it is really too specific to ever be all-encompassing. I will keep searching. What are your thoughts?

    Oliver!

  4. Written by Andrew Lodge
    on Sunday, 20 November 2005 at 07.48
    Permalink

    Hi all! (from not so sunny England)

    I noticed your correspondence on the phenomina of 'earworms'…and thought this would make an interesting follow up or at least add another angle!

    Well 'earworms' is in fact our company name, let me tell you a bit about our earworms (mbt).

    MBT – meaning Musical Brain Trainer: http://www.earwormslearning.com

    We are putting this phenomina to a positive and educational use and recently demontrated our concept to the BBC (live interview) and have stirred up plenty of national interest here in the UK – please do read on.

    —————————————————————-

    earworms (mbt) accelerated learning – in a nutshell:

    Teaching approach. How to memorise the target language.

    Ever wondered why you just can’t get that song out of your head? earworms uses this same brain function to boost the retention of words and phrases when learning a language. It's a well known fact that we use only a fraction of our brain power and traditional book learning is now recognised as not suiting every learner.

    Course author Marlon Lodge recognised this early on in the context of his teaching and has developed simple techniques which open up and exploit more of the brain's native power. He explains: “Music is an ideal medium for learning. It gets to deeper subconscious levels of your memory, and most people really enjoy it….Although you feel that you are just listening to music, subconsciously you are taking in masses of verbs, nouns and connecting words, and picking up the correct accent all the time!”

    The idea is as simple as it is old. Before the age of writing, ancient historical events (e.g. in the Finnish sagas) were recorded in verse and song form for easy memorisation. In his book 'Songlines' Bruce Chatwin describes how the Australian Aborigines were able to navigate their way across hundreds of miles of desert to their ancestral hunting grounds without maps. And how? The extensive lyrics of their traditional songs were exact descriptions of the routes!

    Rhythm and words, i.e. song and verse, have always been a very powerful memory aid, and this is supported by recent scientific research*. The advertising industry knows only too well how powerful music can be in getting the message across with brainwashing-like jingles and sound-bites. earworms (mbt) puts this potential to a positive educational use.

    What you learn. How the courses are structured.

    earworms adopts the so-called lexical approach to language. In essence, this means we look at language in terms of whole meaningful chunks, then break these down into their component bite-sized, easily digestible, easily absorbable parts and then reconstruct them. You not only learn complete, immediately useful phrases, you also intuitively learn something about the structure (the grammar) of the language.

    These ‘chunks' which the learner can ‘mix and match', gradually build up to cover whole areas of the language.

    This may sound logical to the layman, but it is only very recently that this approach (as expounded by Michael Lewis in his book “The Lexical Approach”) has been taken up in the classroom.

    *In the March 2005 issue of the journal “Nature” researchers at Dartmouth College in the US reported that they had pinpointed the region of the brain where ‘earworms' or catchy tunes reside, the auditory cortex. They found that the sounds and words that have actually been heard can be readily recalled from the auditory cortex where the brain can perceptually hear or reconstruct them. Music, it seems, is the ideal catalyst to memorisation.

    The demand for effective language learning.

    Recent news and developments*

    The UK government and the business community are insisting that we dramatically improve our language skills. Britain's economic future will be “compromised” unless more students study foreign languages, according to Sir Digby Jones, the director-general of the CBI, and the government is supporting its appeal with structured programmes and financial backing, investing an extra £115 million in promoting language learning in 2005 plus £10 million for each year thereafter.

    “Anyone who is serious about doing business in international context needs to wake up to the need for languages,” said Hugh Morgan Williams from the CBI. But the take–up of language learning programmes does not match this latent demand.

    The reasons have a lot to do with our preconceptions of language learning – that it must be difficult, time consuming and dry, and this pretty much reflects the state of affairs in the UK language learning scene.

    Learning through music and repetition is especially effective for young learners!

    Given the widespread popularity of pop music especially in Britain, and the fact that music has been scientifically proven to be an excellent memory aid, earworms is a language learning tool ‘made in heaven’ for UK learners, especially young learners who the government has in its sights at the moment. The system has been extremely successful in classroom tests, and the resonance among teachers and pupils has been more than enthusiastic.

    A common reaction has been “Why hasn't this been done before?” or “At last a learning product that really helps you to remember!”

    Why hasn't music been used more in education up to now?

    Imagine kids at school getting a CD of hip-hop songs with all the historical dates or all the French verbs they have to learn, or all the countries and capitals of the world! Wouldn't that make their (and teachers') school lives much easier, much more fun, much more successful.

    Rest assured we are working on it!

    I look forward to hearing from you.

    Best Regards

    Andrew Lodge
    Managing Director
    ===================
    earworms (mbt) Ltd.
    ===================

    Tel: +44(0)1493 377322
    Fax: +44(0)1493 377291
    Web: http://www.earwormslearning.com

  5. […] my thing) and it's a little bit too private. And… um, sorry about the nasty earworm I just gave you with the title. Unless you're lucky enoug […]

  6. Written by Sabine
    on Friday, 6 January 2006 at 12.36
    Permalink

    Hi,

    oooh, this is frustrating… I was so excited when I heard that the word earworm is an official word in the english language!

    The reason: I worked as an aupair girl in London in 1988 and one day I told my hostfamiliy, that I´ve got an earworm (translated from german into english). They didn´t know the word, were shocked first (oh, is she ill), then amused. From then on they used the word as a running gag. When I left London and came to see my host family a year later, I noticed that their friends also said "earworm" and I was convinced that it was me, who created a new word…

    When I started reading your article, I smiled and thought proudly: I can tell him where this word came from, but then you wrote that it was already mentioned 1987… What a pity!!!!

    Anyway: I liked your article! :o)

    Best wishes,

    Sabine

  7. Written by Owlmirror
    on Monday, 27 March 2006 at 20.54
    Permalink

    I've just been searching for the origins of "earworm" in Google Groups, and for the same reason you had (I was sure that I had seen the word used on Usenet before Kellaris allegedly "coined" it), and noticed a posting that I think is amusingly appropriate, given the 3rd post above:

    http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.german/msg/0836a53ffe83821a?dmode=source&hl=en

    Whenever we go to Germany or Austria, we buy as many pop music CDs as we
    can afford. There's nothing like an "Ohrwurm" to cement idiomatic phrases
    firmly into your gray matter…and most pop tunes are loaded with idomatic
    expressions!

  8. Written by Oliver Searle
    on Tuesday, 16 May 2006 at 11.36
    Permalink

    As a follow-up to my previous comment, I have finally finished my piece, "earworm", and drawn some conclusions through my own research.

    My take on the subject, musically-speaking, was not to simply attempt to emulate an earworm (which I thought to be rather naive, and possibly extremely repetitive/irritating), but instead to try to recreate the feeling of frustration attached to the phenomenon and the fickle jumping between musical pieces/genres that occurs. I have explored this through sudden juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated material (which contain the earworm in many differing guises).

    I have been writing a music test for people with cochlear implants and have taken one of the "themes"(yes, sometimes modern composers do write tunes – although, admittedly, not too often), which I used for one of the files; the "Mu.S.I.C. Test" should turn up some responses with search engines. I came across the phenomenon whilst working on the test with German colleagues and thought it apt to link this into a more extensive work.

    If interested, and in the UK over the summer, earworm will be performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (NYOS) in various venues…

    Would love to know anyone's take on this interpretation…

    Oliver!

  9. Written by James Kellaris
    on Saturday, 1 July 2006 at 17.57
    Permalink

    James Kellaris here – responding at the speed of academe! For the record, I never actually claimed to have "coined" the term earworm. An inaccurate report in the New York Times claimed that I coined the term, despite my explanation that I had merely borrowed a term already in use. Other vehicles picked up the story from the Times. I've since heard from countless, often irrate people, who naturally assumed the report to be accurate and me to be a fraud – on Schwindler's List as it were. Very sad. The pun, that is.

    Journalism is about the facts. My research is about the truth. The difference is apparently one can fabricate facts under deadline pressure.

    Also for the record – I submitted a correction to the wiki Earworm entry, but have not seen the correction posted yet. In addition to the the more serious inaccuracy, the article demoted me! I'm a bloody Professor-no-less; and academics at this lofty rank eat associate professors for breakfast!

    Alors, donc, nice blog. I'd like to hear Oliver's piece sometime. I'm an amateur composer of non-earworm chamber music… self-administered music therapy I suppose.

    Cheers!
    – James

    James J. Kellaris, PhD, blah, blah, blah
    University of Cincinnati

  10. Written by Zode
    on Wednesday, 26 July 2006 at 09.24
    Permalink

    Thanks for such an interesting description of the etiology. Your contribution (& partners) is illuminating. Thanks for the reassurance that classical music can "worm ya"; preferrable to YMCA… ~ Z

  11. Written by Rebecca
    on Saturday, 30 December 2006 at 22.03
    Permalink

    I am a student of architecture presently researching unconscious exchanges between people (friends, acquaintances or strangers) crossing paths in the public sphere. Having always been interested in the earworms continually hatching in my head (I am a woman and a musician so it seems I am particularly susceptable), I began to wonder whether one could trace the spread of a particular musical meme through space. For weeks now, I have been searching for research conducted on the topic, but in vain: there is much information available on memetics, non-verbal communication and, of course, a lot of chatter about earworms as a concept, but I've yet to find any substantial research having to do with the transfer of earworms from person to person. Please, if anyone can point me toward the information I seek, do so! Oh, and, Sabine, I suspect most words are simultaneously inducted by multiple philologists: I think you can consider yourself one of the coiners.
    Rebecca

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply

To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.

I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.