Trustworthy

How to spell trustworthy

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce trustworthy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does trustworthy mean?

1. adjectiveAble to be relied on as honest, reliable, or capable of being trusted.

Trustworthy in a sentence

• The bank needed a trustworthy employee to handle the cash deposits.

• Reviewers described the used car dealer as honest and trustworthy.

Where does trustworthy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, built from two older words. The first element, trust, came into English from the Old Norse word traust, meaning 'help, confidence, or protection', which Norse settlers brought to Britain; it is related to a Germanic root meaning 'firm' or 'strong', the same family that gives us 'true'. The second element, worthy, descends from the Old English weorth, meaning 'value' or 'worth', plus the suffix that signals 'deserving of'. Joined together, the word literally means 'deserving of trust', and it appears in English from around the early nineteenth century as the demand grew for a single adjective describing a reliable person or thing. The spelling trap lives in the second half: the -wor- is pronounced like 'wer', and the silent flow of -worthy is easy to slip on, while the whole word stays as one solid compound with no hyphen.

How the word is built

• trust (reliance, confidence)
• -worthy (deserving, worth having)