A hole made by a burrowing worm or insect in wood, fruit, books, etc.
1593. Shaks., Lucr., 946. To fill with worme-holes stately monuments. Ibid. (1599), Hen. V., II. iv. 86. ’Tis no sinister, nor no awk-ward Clayme, Pickt from the worme-holes of long-vanisht dayes.
1615. Rowlands, Melancholie Knt., 33. Old bookes, wherein the worm-holes doe remaine.
1684. J. S., Profit & Pleas. United, 167. As for your Float let it be of the lightest Cork you can get, clear from cracks or worme holes.
1774. Goldsm., Nat. Hist., VIII. 23. Others, whose time of transformation is also near at hand, fasten their tails to a tree, or to the first worm-hole they meet, in a beam.
1858. O. W. Holmes, Aut. Breakf.-t. (1883), 261. An apple with a worm-hole.
1874. Willshire, Anc. Prints, iii. 79. The worm-holes so frequently to be met with in the old crab and pear-wood blocks of the early masters.
Hence Worm-holed a., perforated with worm-holes.
1870. Lowell, Among My Books, Ser. I. 202. The resolution and persistence of the one, like sound timber wormholed and made shaky, as it were, by the other’s infirmity of will and discontinuity of purpose.
1875. ‘Shelsley Beauchamp,’ Nelly Hamilton, I. 166. ‘See, sir,’ he would say as he turned the chairs over with a rap on the floor, to shake the sawdust out. ‘There’s the proof: worm-holed you see, sir, worm-holed.’
