Ear Worm

The English term is a calque from the German Ohrwurm ("ear worm"), which had long described the phenomenon in German-speaking culture. The earliest known use in English appeared in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway, where the author acknowledged the word's German origin; the meaning spread into everyday English in the early 1980s. The phenomenon was first studied systematically around 2001 by researcher James Kellaris, with empirical findings published in the British Journal of Psychology in 2010 confirming that earworms affect nearly all people and typically last 15–30 seconds.