world

English

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Wikipedia

Etymology

From Middle English world, weoreld, from Old English world, worold, woruld, weorold (“world, age, men, humanity, life, way of life, long period of time, cycle, eternity”), from Proto-Germanic *weraldiz (“lifetime, worldly existence, mankind, age of man, world”), equivalent to wer (“man”) +‎ eld (“age”). Cognate with Scots warld (“world”), West Frisian wrâld (“world”), Dutch wereld (“world”), Low German Werld (“world”), German Welt (“world”), Swedish värld (“world”), Icelandic veröld (“the world”).

Pronunciation

Noun

Wikipedia has an article on:

Wikipedia world (countable and uncountable; plural worlds)

  1. (with “the”) Human collective existence; existence in general.
    There will always be lovers, till the world’s end.
  2. The Universe.
  3. (uncountable, with “the”) The Earth.
    People are dying of starvation all over the world.
  4. (countable) A planet, especially one which is inhabited or inhabitable.
    Our mission is to travel the galaxy and find new worlds.
    • 2007 September 27, Marc Rayman (interviewee), “NASA's Ion-Drive Asteroid Hunter Lifts Off”, National Public Radio:
      I think many people think of asteroids as kind of little chips of rock. But the places that Dawn is going to really are more like worlds.
  5. An individual or group perspective or social setting.
    In the world of boxing, good diet is all-important.
  6. (informal) A great amount.
    a world of difference
    a world of trouble
    a world of embarrassment

Synonyms

  • (the earth): Earth, the earth, the globe, Sol III
  • (a planet):
  • (individual or group perspective or social setting): circle

Derived terms

Terms derived from world (noun)

Translations

human collective existence
the universe
the earth
inhabited planet
individual or group perspective or social setting
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Help:How to check translations.
Translations to be checked

Verb

world (third-person singular simple present worlds, present participle worlding, simple past and past participle worlded)

  1. to consider or cause to be considered from a global perspective; to consider as a global whole, rather than making or focussing on national or other distinctions; compare globalise
    • 1996, Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A feminist international politics, pages ix-x:
      There are by now many feminisms (Tong, 1989; Humm, 1992). [...] They are in shifting alliance or contest with postmodern critiques, which at times seem to threaten the very category 'women' and its possibilities for a feminist politics. These debates inform this attempt at worlding women—moving beyond white western power centres and their dominant knowledges (cf. Spivak, 1985), while recognising that I, as a white settler-state woman, need to attend to differences between women, too.
    • 2005, James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry, published by Stanford University Press, ISBN-13 978-0804750714:
      In a sense, the dictatorship was a failure of failure and, on that account, it was perhaps the exemplary system of control. Having in 1933 wagered on the worlding of the world in the regime's failure, Heidegger after the war can only rue his opportunistic hopes for an exposure of the ontological foundations of control.
  2. to make real; to make worldly

See also

Statistics

Anagrams

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Middle English

Etymology

From Old English woruld, worold.

Noun

world (plural worlds)

  1. world

Descendants

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Last modified on 22 May 2013, at 02:26