Worth means having a particular value, or deserving the effort. Worth a fortune, worth a try, not worth it.
It behaves oddly: worth takes a direct object with no preposition — worth ten pounds, worth reading — which is unusual for an adjective. Worth it is the everyday judgement of whether something repays the trouble. Note worthwhile; net worth, meaning total assets less debts; and for what it is worth, which is a hedge before an opinion nobody asked for.
1adjectiveworthHaving a particular value.~98%
“This old painting could be worth a lot of money.”
2adjectivedeservingDeserving the effort.~2%
“The museum is small, but it's well worth a visit.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
worth is a quality of value.
Old English weorth meant valuable, from a Germanic root. Worship is the same word plus -ship — worth-ship, the condition of being worthy.
Proto-Indo-European
*wert-
Proto-Germanic
*werþaz — worthy, valuable
Proto-West Germanic
*werþ
Old English
weorþ
Middle English
worth
English, today
worth
From Middle English worth, from Old English weorþ, from Proto-West Germanic werþ, from Proto-Germanic werþaz (“worthy, valuable”); from Proto-Indo-European wert-. Cognate with Scots wirth (“worth”), cim bèart (“worth, value”), Dutch waard, weerd (“worth”), German wert (“worth”) (the source of Polish wart (“worth”), Ukrainian вартість (“worth, value”), etc), lb wäert (“worth”), Yiddish ווערט, ווערד (“worth, value”), Danish værd (“worth”), Faroese - and Icelandic verður (“worth”), Norwegian Bokmål verdt (“worth”), Norwegian Nynorsk verd (“worth”), Swedish värd (“worth”), Gothic 𐍅𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌸 (“worth, value”), Welsh gwerth (“worth, value”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA