Worldly means concerned with material life, or experienced in it. Worldly goods, worldly wisdom, a worldly man.
In religious use it is a mild reproach: worldly concerns are the ones that distract from spiritual ones, and all my worldly goods is from the marriage service. In secular use it is a compliment meaning experienced and unshockable — worldly wise. Note otherworldly, which means strange and dreamlike; and that worldly is one of the -ly adjectives, so it never becomes an adverb.
1adjectiveworldlyConcerned with material rather than spiritual life.
“The monk gave away all his worldly possessions and lived in a cave.”
2adjectiveexperiencedExperienced in the ways of the world.
“She was worldly at roughly nineteen.”
worldly is a quality of material experience.
Old English woruldlic is world plus -lic, the ancestor of -ly. World itself is wer plus eld — the age of man — so worldly means belonging to the age of people.
Proto-Germanic
*weraldilīkaz
Old English
woruldlīċ
Middle English
worldly
English, today
worldly
Built from
From Middle English worldly, worldlich, wordly, from Old English woruldlīċ, worldlīċ, weoroldlīċ (“worldly; earthly; temporal; mundane; secular”), from Proto-Germanic weraldilīkaz, equivalent to world + ly. Cognate with Dutch wereldlijk (“worldly; secular”), German Low German weltlik (“worldly”), German weltlich (“worldly”), Danish verdslig (“worldly”), Swedish världslig (“worldly”), Icelandic veraldlegur (“worldly; secular”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA