The New Hacker's Dictionary

2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility.

3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a criticism or suggestion. At IBM, this sense is used in official documents! See BAD.

worm // n.

[from 'tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel "The Shockwave Rider", via XEROX PARC] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare virus. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is assumed that only crackers write worms. Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's Great Worm of 1988, a 'benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also cracker, RTM, Trojan horse, ice.

wormhole /werm'hohl/ n.

[from the 'wormhole' singularities hypothesized in some versions of General Relativity theory]

1. [n.,obs.] A location in a monitor which contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to substitute a different routine. This term is now obsolescent; modern operating systems use clusters of wormholes extensively (for modularization of I/O handling in particular, as in the Unix device-driver organization) but the preferred techspeak for these clusters is 'device tables', 'jump tables' or 'capability tables'.

2. [Amateur Packet Radio] A network path using a commercial satellite link to join two or more amateur VHF networks. So called because traffic routed through a wormhole leaves and re-enters the amateur network over great distances with usually little clue in the message routing header as to how it got from one relay to the other. Compare gopher hole (sense 2).

wound around the axle // adj.

In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.

wrap around // vi.

(also n. 'wraparound' and v. shorthand 'wrap')

1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at 'minus infinity' (see infinity) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0).