Word Of The Day

writhe

writhe • \RYTHE\  • verb
To writhe is to twist one’s body from side to side. The word is often used when the body or a bodily part is twisting in pain.

// The injured player lay on the football field, writhing in pain.

// At the instruction of their teacher, the children rolled the fallen log aside to reveal worms and other small critters writhing in the soft earth.

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Examples:
“The creatures named after writers are mostly bugs, which makes sense. There are a lot of those little guys writhing around, and I imagine most of them escaped our attention for long enough that science had to start reaching for new names. And a lot of them are wasps: Dante has two wasps named after him; Marx has two, Didion has one, Dickens has two, Zola has two, Thoreau has seven, and Shakespeare has three wasps and a bacterium. Nabokov has a lot of butterflies, naturally.” — James Folta, LitHub.com, 25 Aug. 2025

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