Other forms: worlds
The world is the earth and everybody living on it. Around the world, the whole world, the world is changing.
It also means a particular sphere of activity or experience: the art world, the world of work, her world fell apart. The compounds are countless — world war, world record, world champion, world view, third world — and so are the idioms: out of this world, the best of both worlds, mean the world to somebody, and what in the world are you doing. Note worldwide, and worldly, meaning experienced in the ways of life rather than global.
1nounworldThe earth and everybody living on it.~98%
“The news went round the world in about an hour.”
2nounparticularA particular area of life or activity.~2%
“The art world closes ranks quickly.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
world is the earth, or a sphere of life.
Old English weorold is wer, a man, plus ald, age — the age of man, meaning human existence rather than the planet. The English word for the world is really a word for a lifetime, which is why it slides so easily into someone's world.
Middle English
world
English, today
world
Built from
From Middle English world. From Middle English world, from Old English weorold (“world”), from Proto-West Germanic weraldi, from Proto-Germanic weraldiz (“lifetime, human existence, world”) literally “age/era of man”, equivalent to wer + eld. Eclipsed non-native mounde, from monde, munde (“world”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA