Worldview

How to spell worldview

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce worldview

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does worldview mean?

1. nounThe overall way a person or group understands and interprets the world, including their beliefs and values.

Worldview in a sentence

• Travelling abroad for a year completely reshaped her worldview.

• The two candidates held a fundamentally different worldview on the role of government.

Where does worldview come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining 'world' to 'view', but its modern meaning is borrowed wholesale from the German word Weltanschauung, which literally means 'world-perception' (Welt 'world' plus Anschauung 'view, perception'). German thinkers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used Weltanschauung for the comprehensive way a person or culture understands existence, and English writers in the nineteenth century first translated it phrase by phrase as 'view of the world' before settling on the tidy single-word calque 'worldview'. The 'world' half traces back to Old English woruld, originally a compound meaning roughly 'age of man' or 'human existence', while the 'view' half came through Old French from the Latin videre, 'to see', the same root behind 'vision' and 'video'. The word is now usually written solid, with no space or hyphen, though older texts still show 'world view' and 'world-view'. Knowing that it is simply 'world' plus 'view' fused together is the surest guard against dropping a letter at the join.

How the word is built

• world (Old English woruld: human existence, the earth)
• view (from Old French veüe: a seeing, from Latin videre: to see)