Other forms: maggots
A maggot is the legless white young of a fly. Maggots in the bin, a wriggling maggot, use maggots as bait.
Medicine uses them deliberately: sterile maggots placed in a wound eat dead tissue and leave living tissue alone, which is called debridement and works where other methods fail. Anglers buy them by the pint. They appear because a fly laid eggs, not from nothing.
1nounmaggotThe legless white young of a fly.
“The fisherman kept a tin of maggots to use as bait.”
maggot is a larva.
Middle English magot is probably an altered form of maddock, a worm, from Old Norse mathkr.
Proto-Germanic
*maþô
Proto-West Germanic
*maþō
Middle English
magot
English, today
maggot
Built from
From Middle English magot, magat, maked, probably a metathetic alteration of maddock, maðek (“worm", "maggot”), originally a diminutive form of a base represented by Old English maþa (Scots mathe), from Proto-West Germanic maþō, from Proto-Germanic maþô, from the Proto-Indo-European - root mat, which was used in insect names, equivalent to made + ock. Near-cognates include Dutch made, German Made and Swedish mask, Icelandic maðkur (“worm, grub, maggot”). The use of maggot to mean a fanciful or whimsical thing derives from the folk belief that a whimsical or crotchety person had maggots in their brain.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA