wormhole
noun
Did you know?
If you associate wormhole with quantum physics and sci-fi, you'll probably be surprised to learn that the word has been around since William Shakespeare's day. To Shakespeare, a "wormhole" was simply a hole made by a worm, but even the Bard subtly linked wormholes to the passage of time; for example, in the poem The Rape of Lucrece, he notes time's destructive power "to fill with worm-holes stately monuments." To modern astrophysicists, a wormhole isn't a tunnel wrought by a slimy invertebrate, but a theoretical tunnel between two black holes or other points in space-time, providing a shortcut between its end points.
Examples of wormhole in a Sentence
Big Think, 22 Aug. 2025
Overhauling the football calendar is immensely complex, akin to a game of seven-dimensional chess played inside a wormhole.
—Jon Wilner, Mercury News, 7 Aug. 2025
As of now, scientists don’t know enough about the characteristics of wormholes to confidently identify them, such as the types of situations that would create a wormhole, the properties of a wormhole, and how to detect said properties.
—Madison Dapcevich, Discover Magazine, 1 Aug. 2025
And the buzz about the DESI results, despite their preliminary nature, illuminate scientists’ hope that discrepancies like this could be wormholes to new ideas, and so progress.
—Sarah Scoles, JSTOR Daily, 31 July 2025
See All Example Sentences for wormhole
Cite this Entry
“Wormhole.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wormhole. Accessed 7 Sep. 2025.
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wormhole
noun
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