Worlds

How to spell worlds

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce worlds

What does worlds mean?

1. nounMore than one planet, realm, or self-contained sphere of existence or activity.

Worlds in a sentence

• The documentary explored distant worlds orbiting other stars.

• Her novels imagine entire worlds with their own languages and laws.

Where does worlds come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The singular world descends from Old English weorold, which was a compound built from wer, meaning 'man' or 'human being', and a second element related to eald, meaning 'age' or 'era'. Taken together the original sense was something like 'the age of man' or 'the span of human existence', a thoroughly Germanic idea rather than a borrowing from Latin or Greek. Cousin forms appear across the Germanic family, such as Old High German weralt and Old Norse verold, all carrying that same notion of human lifetime or the inhabited earth. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from 'human existence' to 'the earth and everything in it', and then to any self-contained sphere or domain. The plural worlds simply adds the regular -s ending, and because the singular already ends in a consonant cluster, no spelling change is needed beyond appending the s. The old wer 'man' element survives elsewhere too, most famously inside werewolf, literally a 'man-wolf'.

How the word is built

• world (Old English weorold: age or life of man)
• -s (plural suffix)