Meaning
A darkly humorous way of saying that someone is dead and buried: a corpse, sustenance for the creatures of the grave. The phrase is a dysphemism, often used of one's own future remains and sometimes with the pointed implication that death is the end and nothing follows it. Dark-humour register: flippant about death by design, so avoid it in grief contexts. It sits in this site's catalogue beside six feet under, pushing up daisies and cross the River Styx as one of the gravedust euphemisms. The compact form worm food is now the commoner in journalism. Regional use: All English-speaking countries.
Origin
A macabre extension of the plain observation that burial ends in consumption by worms. The OED's earliest evidence for worm food is from 1830, in The Olio, and Wiktionary quotes that first citation in full: 'Say, have ye a drug that will make worm's food of your enemy in an hour?' The print trail runs from there through the New York Times of 1996, in which a prosecutor recalled a killer joking he had 'turned the Warrens into worm food'; the Washington Post of 2007 ('instead of being ashes or worm food'); the Telegraph of 2012 ('for those of us who think that the grave is the end of us, when we shall become food for worms, the sensible course is to make the most of every passing hour'); and Newsweek in 2013. Wiktionary labels the term darkly humorous and dysphemistic and notes it is sometimes used from the point of view that there is no afterlife; The Free Dictionary's idiom guide glosses it flatly as 'dead and buried'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- worm food
- worm's food
Usage Examples
- The old soldier joked that he would be food for worms within the year, then outlived three of his doctors.
- He left strict instructions: no ceremony, no headstone, just food for worms like everyone else.
- The gravedigger in the play keeps addressing the bones as food for worms, which the audience finds less funny than he does.