A parasitic worm that infests animals, especially livestock, causing disease or damage.
Compound of 'hang' and 'worm'; possibly derived from the worm's behavior of hanging or attaching to tissue, though the exact origin is obscure in modern zoological literature.
This term shows how Old English farmers named parasites descriptively by what they seemed to do—'hanging' onto their animals—long before microscopes revealed the actual mechanism of infection.
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