Yes, bookworms are sometimes classified as introverts, but they can be social, too. Such descriptions can be negative, but bookworm is most often used positively, especially as a self-applied label that bookworms use to identify themselves to other bookworms. Bookworms usually love books, though sometimes people are simply called bookworms because they read a lot to study, as in She’s a bookworm-she always has her nose in a textbook. They are also called avid readers or bibliophiles (literally, “people who love books”). Similarly, bookworms are sometimes called voracious readers ( voracious can be mean either “eating a lot” or “very enthusiastic”). One such term is bibliophage, which literally means “someone who devours books” (it can also be used as a name for an insect that eats books, though that’s rare). Interestingly, the eating metaphor is also used in other terms for people who read a lot. For the record, not all worms are insects, but some are, including the booklouse, which is a wingless insect that often lives among books and papers and is known to feed on the binding paste used to hold some books together. Only later was bookworm used in reference to insects that eat books. For example, in a work by English playwright and poet Ben Jonson, a book-worme (as he spelled it) is described as a candle-waster, presumably implying that the person reads so much that they end up reading by candlelight and “wasting” candles just to read. The word was first used to refer to people who read a lot, often as an insult. The first records of the word bookworm come from the late 1500s.

Real bookworm