Why Do They Call Them Earwigs? The Origin of the Name

The name “earwig” traces back to Old English, where “ēare” meant ear and “wicga” meant something like insect or wiggler. Put together, the word roughly translates to “ear creature,” and it reflects an ancient, widespread belief that these small insects had a habit of crawling into the ears of sleeping people. That superstition proved remarkably durable and far-reaching, shaping not just the English name but the common names for earwigs across most European languages.

The Old English Roots

The compound “ēarwicga” appears in Anglo-Saxon texts dating back over a thousand years. “Ēare” is straightforward enough: it is the ancestor of the modern English word “ear.” The second half, “wicga,” is less familiar today, but it functioned as a general term for an insect or a crawling, wriggling creature. So the original speakers of Old English were essentially calling this animal the “ear-insect,” the bug that gets into your ear.

This was not a neutral descriptive label. It carried with it a specific folk belief: that earwigs would crawl into a sleeping person’s ear canal, burrow through the eardrum, and eventually eat the brain. The name originated from this ancient superstition, one that persisted in popular imagination for centuries even though it was never supported by evidence.¹ The name, in other words, was not just a description of the insect. It was a condensed horror story.

The Same Idea in Nearly Every European Language

What makes the earwig’s name especially interesting is how consistent the ear association is across unrelated European languages. In French, the common name is “perce-oreille,” which means “ear-piercer.” In German, it is “Ohrwurm” (ear worm) or historically “Ohrenkneifer” (ear pincher). Spanish uses “tijereta” (little scissors), which refers to the pincers rather than the ear, but many Spanish dialects also use ear-related folk names. Russian, Czech, and other Slavic languages have their own versions of the same idea.

A study on superstitious beliefs surrounding earwigs found that despite no evidence for any real association between earwigs and human ears, the common names for these insects in nearly every European language refer to exactly that connection.² This cross-linguistic pattern suggests the superstition was not a quirk of one culture but a deeply embedded folk belief across much of Europe. Whether it spread from a single origin or arose independently in multiple places is hard to untangle, but the result is the same: wherever Europeans encountered earwigs, they associated them with ears.

Do Earwigs Actually Crawl Into Ears?

The brain-eating part of the myth is pure fiction. No earwig has the ability to burrow through an eardrum, let alone consume brain tissue. The insect’s mouthparts are built for chewing plant material and small soft-bodied insects, not for drilling through bone and membrane. But the earwig-in-the-ear idea is not entirely baseless. Earwigs are nocturnal, thigmotactic creatures, meaning they seek out tight, dark, warm crevices to hide in during the day. A human ear canal, while not their preferred habitat, does technically qualify as a tight, dark, warm space.

Medical case reports confirm that earwigs occasionally do wander into ears, typically in people sleeping outdoors or in infested environments. A clinical review noted that although the brain-eating superstition is unfounded, earwigs sometimes do enter the ear canal.¹ This is not unique to earwigs; many small insects end up in ear canals by accident. Cockroaches, moths, ants, and small beetles all show up in emergency departments for the same reason. Earwigs just had the misfortune of being named after the phenomenon, which made the association stick in a way it never did for cockroaches.

When an earwig does get into an ear, it is not trying to nest there or reach the brain. It is simply a confused insect that crawled into a crevice and cannot easily reverse course. The treatment is the same as for any foreign body in the ear: gentle irrigation or removal by a clinician. It is uncomfortable and alarming but not dangerous in the way the old superstition implied.

The Wing-Shape Theory

A less dramatic explanation for the name has circulated among entomologists and etymology buffs. Earwig hind wings, when fully unfolded, are thin, fan-shaped membranes that bear a passing resemblance to a human ear. The idea is that “earwig” might originally have described the shape of the insect’s wings rather than any behavior involving human ears. This theory is appealing because it offers a rational, observation-based origin rather than a superstitious one.

The wings themselves are genuinely remarkable. When folded, earwig hind wings achieve the most compact wing storage of any insect, packing a large membrane into a tiny space beneath short, leathery forewings called tegmina.³ The unfolded wing is roughly ten times the area of its folded state, which is an extraordinary engineering feat. Engineers have studied the folding pattern for applications in deployable structures, from satellite solar panels to compact shelters.⁴

However, the wing-shape theory has a significant weakness: most people in pre-modern Europe would never have seen an earwig’s hind wings unfolded. Earwigs rarely fly and keep their wings tucked away almost all the time. It seems unlikely that a common folk name across an entire continent would have been inspired by a feature that almost nobody ever observed. The ear-crawling superstition, by contrast, is well-documented in folklore, medical texts, and folk remedies going back centuries. Most etymologists consider the superstition the more likely origin, with the wing-shape idea being an after-the-fact rationalization that happens to sort of fit.

How the Myth Persisted

Superstitions about earwigs did not stop at the name. In various European folk traditions, earwigs were associated with a range of harms beyond ear invasion. Some traditions held that earwigs could cause deafness. Others warned that the insects would lay eggs inside the ear canal, leading to an infestation inside the head. A few folk remedies for earwig intrusion survive in historical records, including pouring warm oil or urine into the ear to flush the insect out. The oil remedy, incidentally, is still used in modified form for removing insects from ears in clinical settings, though modern practitioners use mineral oil rather than the more colorful alternatives.

Part of what kept the myth alive was the earwig’s appearance. The prominent cerci, the pincer-like appendages at the rear of the abdomen, look menacing out of proportion to the insect’s actual threat level. People encountering a small, dark, fast-moving insect with what appear to be sharp pincers can be forgiven for assuming the worst. The pincers reinforced the cultural narrative that earwigs were aggressive, invasive creatures capable of doing real damage inside a person’s body. In reality, the pincers are used mostly for defense, mating displays, and prey capture, and they rarely break human skin.

What Earwigs Are Actually Like

The gap between the earwig’s reputation and its actual biology is striking. Far from being the sinister brain-invaders of folklore, earwigs are omnivorous scavengers that eat decaying plant material, small insects like aphids, and occasionally living plant tissue. They are nocturnal and spend most of their time in damp, sheltered places: under rocks, in mulch, beneath bark, or inside rolled-up newspapers left on a porch.

One of the most distinctive things about earwigs, and one that gets almost no attention compared to the ear myth, is their maternal behavior. Female European earwigs provide extensive care to their eggs and young nymphs, a trait that is unusual among non-social insects. Mothers guard their egg clutches, clean them to prevent fungal infection, and continue tending to the nymphs after hatching.⁵ Research has shown that this care is not just passive guarding. Mothers actively adjust their behavior in response to pathogen threats in the environment, increasing their investment in egg maintenance when fungal spores are present.⁶

This level of parental investment is more commonly associated with social insects like ants and bees, which makes earwigs an interesting case study in the evolution of care behavior. Earwigs are not eusocial, meaning they do not have the caste systems and cooperative colonies of ants, but their maternal behavior goes well beyond what most solitary insects do.

Chemical Defenses and the Pincers

The fearsome-looking cerci are only part of the earwig’s defensive toolkit. Several earwig species also produce chemical secretions from abdominal glands that deter predators. Adult earwigs of the European species and its relatives produce benzoquinone compounds from specialized glands, and these secretions have antibacterial, antifungal, and anti-nematode properties.⁷ The secretions are malodorous and unpleasant enough to discourage many would-be predators.

Even earwig larvae have chemical defenses, though they produce them from different glands than the adults do. Larval earwigs release secretions that effectively deter ant attacks, though the same secretions do not seem to bother spiders.⁸ The fact that earwigs switch from one set of defensive glands in larval stages to another in adulthood is an unusual developmental strategy that reflects how much selection pressure these insects face from predators.

The combination of mechanical pincers and chemical deterrents gives earwigs a layered defense system, which helps explain why they have been successful enough to colonize habitats across most of the world. About 2,000 species of earwigs have been described, and they are found on every continent except Antarctica.

Earwigs in the Garden

For many people, the most practical question about earwigs is whether they are pests, helpers, or something in between. The answer, frustratingly, is that they are both. A study of earwig activity in a Mediterranean organic citrus orchard found that earwigs played a dual role: they reduced aphid infestations, acting as beneficial predators, but they also reduced flower survival by feeding on blossoms.⁹

In home gardens, this duality plays out in similar ways. Earwigs eat aphids, mites, and insect eggs, which makes them useful if you are dealing with soft-bodied pest problems. But they also nibble on soft fruits like strawberries, on flower petals, and on tender seedlings, which makes them unwelcome in certain parts of the garden. Whether you consider them friend or foe depends largely on what you are growing and how many earwigs are present. A few earwigs in a vegetable garden may do more good than harm. A large population in a strawberry patch is a different story.

The standard approach for managing earwigs when they become a nuisance is trapping rather than broad-spectrum pesticides. Rolled-up damp newspaper or a shallow container of vegetable oil left out overnight will attract earwigs seeking dark, moist shelter. You check the traps in the morning, dispose of the collected insects, and repeat. It is low-tech but effective, and it avoids killing the beneficial insects that share the garden habitat.

Earwig Evolution and Modern Taxonomy

Earwigs belong to the order Dermaptera, a name that translates to “skin wings” and refers to the leathery forewings that cover and protect the elaborately folded hind wings. The order is ancient, with fossil evidence going back to the Jurassic period, and earwigs have had a long time to diversify into the roughly 2,000 species alive today.

Recent phylogenomic work has reshaped how scientists understand the relationships among earwig lineages. A study analyzing over 3,200 nuclear genes reversed the previously accepted arrangement of major earwig groups, finding that one historically recognized suborder actually nests within the other rather than being its sister group.¹⁰ This reshuffling has implications for how researchers interpret earwig anatomy and trace the evolution of traits like wing folding, maternal care, and the pincers. It is a good reminder that taxonomy is a living science, and what textbooks say about an insect group’s family tree can change dramatically when new molecular data arrives.

The most familiar earwig in North America and much of Europe is the European earwig, Forficula auricularia, which was introduced to North America in the early 1900s. It has since spread across the continent and is the species most people encounter in their homes and gardens. But the diversity of the order extends well beyond this one cosmopolitan species, from tiny cave-dwelling earwigs to tropical species with wingspans several times larger than their temperate relatives.