thumb|Close view of a common teal showing the vermiculation pattern in its feathers. thumb|Detail showing a "vermiculated" background on a chasse (casket)|chasse reliquary casket thumb|Architectural vermiculation in Paris Vermiculation is a surface pattern of dense but irregular lines, so called from the Latin meaning "little worm" because the shapes resemble worms, worm casts, or worm tracks in mud or wet sand. The word may be used in a number of contexts for patterns that have little in common. The adjective vermiculated is more often used than the noun.
thumb|Close view of a common teal showing the vermiculation pattern in its feathers. thumb|Detail showing a "vermiculated" background on a chasse (casket)|chasse reliquary casket thumb|Architectural vermiculation in Paris Vermiculation is a surface pattern of dense but irregular lines, so called from the Latin meaning "little worm" because the shapes resemble worms, worm casts, or worm tracks in mud or wet sand. The word may be used in a number of contexts for patterns that have little in common. The adjective vermiculated is more often used than the noun.
Vermiculation naturally occurs in patterns on a wide variety of species, for example in the feathers of certain birds, for which it may provide either camouflage or decoration. Several species are named after this trait, either in English or by the Latin vermicularis.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).