Worse is the comparative of bad — lower in quality, more unpleasant, more severe. The weather got worse, a worse result, worse than last time.
It is irregular and the whole set has to be learned: bad, worse, worst, with no more and no -er anywhere. Worse also serves as the comparative of badly and of ill, which is why you can play worse and feel worse as well as be worse. The trap is spelling and sound: worse has no t, worst has one, and in speech the difference is a single consonant carrying the whole comparison. Note the fixed phrases: worse still, to make matters worse, and none the worse for it.
1adjectiveworseOf lower quality or more unpleasant than something else.~46%
“The second half was worse than the first.”
synonyms: inferior, poorer
2adjectiveillMore ill than before.~52%
“He was worse in the morning and they called a doctor.”
3adverbgoodIn a less good way.~2%
“She sings worse when she is nervous.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
worse is a comparison.
Old English wiersa was already irregular, and it has stayed that way for a thousand years. English never built a regular comparative for bad because it never needed to: the irregular one was too common to be worn away.
Middle English
worse
English, today
worse
From Middle English worse. From Middle English worse, werse, from Old English wiersa, from Proto-West Germanic wirsiʀō, from Proto-Germanic wirsizô. Cognate with Dutch wers (“worse”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA