The burial mound at Wormelow Tump was of sufficient interest to give the Village its name (see this Note for details of its importance).

A "Tump" is a Tumulus/Round Barrow/Burial Mound (though see Note on Cole's Tump). The origins of the word are unclear, possibly relating (as in Tumulus) to the Latin tumere "to swell" (indeed, this link may account for the legend of the changing sizes of both Wonder 13 and Wonder 14). There is certainly an old Welsh flavour about the word : Webster's 1913, for example, giving its origins as the W[elsh] twmp, twm, a round mass or heap, a hillock (c.f. current Welsh Twmpath). The O.E.D. places its earliest known use in 1589, suggesting the Welsh could have picked it up from English or Latin. However, the Welsh title of the triad the "Three pack-horses of the Island of Britain" is "Tri Thom Edystyr Prydein", and Bromwich suggests Thom (Tom;Tomen) is mound, heap or burden, apparently appearing in the early Welsh Laws (see Other Works) and the Llywarch Hen cycle of poems as such*. It may ultimately relate to the Greek for sepulchral mound, τúμβος, from wherehence the English "tomb" - though the earliest English usage given by the O.E.D. draws an explicit contrast between tombs and tumps.

The Low part is a corruption of the Old English Hla(e)w which usually refers to mounds as well* (see this Note). Such pleonastic names are not uncommon in Britain: the classic example being Torpenhow, which contains three different terms commonly used for hills.

Finally, Worm is apparently(?) from the Old English for 'dusky'* and is the name of a local brook (it is listed in the Liber Llan Dâv [See Other Works] as the Guormui, which might be open to other interpretations).