Other forms: bugs, bugged, bugging
A bug is a small crawling insect — a beetle on the windowsill, something you flick off your arm. It is also the word for a fault in a program: the button that does nothing, the date that shows up as 1970, the app that shuts the moment you open it.
A bug is an illness as well, a mild one going round — a stomach bug, a summer bug. In spying it is a hidden microphone, and the verb comes with it: they bugged the room. That verb has a second life meaning to annoy, and it is everywhere in speech — stop bugging me, it really bugs me. If someone is bitten by the bug they have caught a sudden enthusiasm: the travel bug, the running bug. In strict biology a bug is one particular group of insects, but nobody outside a laboratory keeps to that.
1nouninsectA small insect.~50%
“There was a bug crawling up the inside of the tent.”
2nounsoftwareA mistake in a program that makes it behave wrongly.~42%
“The update fixed a bug that deleted the last line of every file.”
3nounmildA mild illness that spreads from person to person.~2%
“Half the office is off with some bug.”
4nounbugA hidden microphone used for listening in secret.~2%
“They found a bug taped under the desk.”
5verbhideTo hide a microphone in a room or a phone in order to listen secretly.~2%
“The flat had been bugged for months before anyone noticed.”
6verbannoyTo annoy someone.~2%
“It bugs me that the door never closes properly.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The bug that walks was once a bug that frightened: Middle English bugge meant a scarecrow or a hobgoblin. By about 1620 the word had settled onto the bedbug, and from there onto beetles and crawling things in general. Every later bug — the fault in the code, the microphone under the desk, the illness going round the office — grew out of that one small insect.
Middle English
bugge — scarecrow, hobgoblin
English, today
bug
Built from
First attested in this form around 1620 (referring to a “bedbug”), from earlier bugge (“beetle”), from Middle English bugge (“scarecrow, hobgoblin”) which is traced alternatively to:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA