World
nounThe earth, together with all its countries, peoples, and natural features.
How to spell world
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce world
What does world mean?
- nounThe earth, together with all its countries, peoples, and natural features.
World in a sentence
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She spent two years travelling the world before settling down.
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The company now sells its products all over the world.
Where does world come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
World comes from the Old English weorold, a compound of wer, meaning 'man' or 'human being', and a form related to eld, meaning 'age' or 'era'. Literally, then, it once meant something like 'the age of man' or 'human existence', a sense rooted in time as much as in place. Over the centuries it broadened from 'the affairs of human life' to mean the whole earth and everything on it, and later still the universe at large. The same wer element survives, surprisingly, in the word 'werewolf', literally a 'man-wolf'. The modern spelling preserves the unstressed second part, so the 'l' before 'd' is easy to drop when writing quickly.
How the word is built
- wor- (from Old English wer: man)
- -ld (from eld: age, era)
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