world
/wəːld
/- The sea connotes what the land is not, yet together they form the world's surfaces.
- They've sold three million albums, toured all over the world and have been together for almost a decade.
- The couple travelled the world together three years ago and fell in love with Asia.
Synonyms
- On a more serious note, it would appear that the world as a whole is sinking deeper into poverty.
- It's a nice thought that there's someone who loves you, even when you think the whole world hates you.
- They sometimes wonder why the rest of the world hates them so much.
Synonyms
- They are the world champions and a class side, but if they are not quite on their game, that is when you can get at them.
- There are tournaments to play that move you up the world rankings and that's more important now.
- I hope I can go as far as reaching the world number one, but I realize it requires hard work.
- She drove slowly because the sudden collapse of her whole world was affecting the steadiness of her hands.
- She's the center of his whole world.
- My whole world has fallen apart and left me feeling hopeless and depressed.
- By the western part of the Arabic world we mean the regions comprising mainly North Africa and Spain.
- The richest country in the industrialised world will continue to have some of the worst pockets of poverty.
- Several countries in the developing world continue to invite him to help train their own surgeons.
- I sometimes imagine that I see certain parallels between modern Aotearoa and the historical worlds of that other boot-shaped nation, Italy.
- In the ancient and classical worlds, capital tended to be drawn into cities from the surrounding regions, so that they could become wealthier even in the absence of economic growth.
- As the title suggests, Ferguson believes that the British Empire shaped the modern world.
- Lying is one of the most human of traits that really distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world.
- Our folklore and arts and crafts reflect our love and reverence for the animal world.
- On examination, it reveals a coded significance, uniting the worlds of animals, birds, humans and demigods, proposing itself as an image of the universe.
- He still characterises himself as having a foot in both the stand-up and theatre worlds and is currently working with Murphy on putative comic projects.
- They're all hot, contemporary artists who are taking the art world by storm.
- Beaufort inhabited the scientific world dominated by the chronometer invented by John Harrison.
Synonyms
- Autism cuts off its sufferers from the world by impairing social skills and imaginative development.
- These are serious blows to our sense of who we are, what we expect of the world and of our interactions with others.
- I sit here and all my interaction with the world goes fuzzy as if I am falling asleep.
Synonyms
- There is a primary difference between the material world and the spiritual dimension.
- People who see the world in terms of evil and sin will tend to devalue the material world.
- The militantly secular world is also keenly alert to the challenge of the Passion.
- Then the oxygen machine arrived, the pain medications increased, and my mother slipped out of this world and into the next.
- I know who I am, and I know that I can only be myself, because that is the only thing I will carry out of this world, my soul.
- This is an inspiring talk that will help us to establish our own priorities for this world and the next.
- Nevertheless, of all the worlds in our solar system, Mars is most like Earth.
- His ideas on cosmology are quite remarkable for he not only argued for a moving Earth, but he also argued for an infinite universe containing other stars like the Sun and other worlds like the Earth.
- It showed the planets as worlds - some greater, some less, than our earth - but all much vaster than the earth as she had been regarded in ancient times.
Synonyms
Phrases
be not long for this world
the best of both (or all possible) worlds
bring someone into the world
come into the world
come up (or go down) in the world
in an ideal (or a perfect) world
in a world of one's own
in the world
look for all the world like
man (or woman) of the world
not do something for the world
out of this world
see the world
think the world of
the world and his wife
a world away from
the world, the flesh, and the devil
a (or the) world of
(all) the world over
worlds apart
Origin
Old English w(e)oruld, from a Germanic compound meaning 'age of man'; related to Dutch wereld and German Welt.
The ancient root of world meant ‘age or life of man’. The first part is the same as were- in werewolf (see wolf)—it means ‘man’—and the second part is related to old. The Anglo-Saxons first used world to mean ‘human existence, life on earth’ as opposed to future life in heaven or hell. America was first called the New World in 1555, and Europe, Asia, and Africa the Old World at the end of that century. Olde worlde is a ‘fake’ antiquated spelling for old-fashioned things intended to be quaint and attractive, and dates only from the 1920s. The developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were initially known as the Third World in the 1950s by French writers who used tiers monde, ‘third world’, to distinguish the developing countries from the capitalist and Communist blocs. The first use in English came in 1963. The best of all worlds or of all possible worlds is from Candide (1759) by the French writer Voltaire. It is a translation of a statement by the ever-optimistic Pangloss, ‘Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. The character of Pangloss, who remained constantly cheerful despite all the disasters that happened to him and his travelling companions, is a satire on the views of the German philosopher Leibniz, who believed this philosophy. See also optimism, oyster, whim, wife