world
Pronunciation
  • (RP) IPA: /wɜːld/
  • (GA, Canada) enPR: wûrld, IPA: /wɝːld/
  • (New Zealand) enPR: wûrld, IPA: /wɵːld/, [wɵːɯ̯d̥]
Noun

world

  1. (with "the") Human collective existence; existence in general.
    There will always be lovers, till the world’s end.
  2. The Universe.
  3. (uncountable, with "the") The Earth.
    People are dying of starvation all over the world.
    • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 639762314 ↗, page 0045 ↗:
      Serene, smiling, enigmatic, she faced him with no fear whatever showing in her dark eyes. […] She put back a truant curl from her forehead where it had sought egress to the world, and looked him full in the face now, drawing a deep breath which caused the round of her bosom to lift the lace at her throat.
    • 2018, VOA Learning English > China's Melting Glacier Brings Visitors, Adds to Climate Concerns ↗
      She says the Third Pole is one of the world’s largest sources of fresh drinking water.
  4. (countable) A planet, especially one which is inhabited or inhabitable.
    Our mission is to travel the galaxy and find new worlds.
    • 2007 September 27, Marc Rayman (interviewee), “[https://web.archive.org/web/20080203234634/http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14776628 NASA's Ion-Drive Asteroid Hunter Lifts Off]”, National Public Radio:
      I think many people think of asteroids as kind of little chips of rock. But the places that Dawn is going to really are more like worlds.
    1. (by extension) Any other body which may be inhabitable, such as a satellite.
  5. A very large extent of country.
    the New World
  6. (fiction, speculation) A realm, such as planet, containing one or multiple society of being, specially intelligent ones.
    the world of Narnia; the Wizarding World of Harry Potter; a zombie world
  7. An individual or group perspective or social setting.
    In the world of boxing, good diet is all-important.
    Welcome to my world.
  8. (computing) The part of an operating system distributed with the kernel, consisting of the shell and other programs.
  9. (video games) A subdivision of a game, consisting of a series of stages or levels that usually share a similar environment or theme.
    Have you reached the boss at the end of the ice world?
    There's a hidden warp to the next world down this pipe.
  10. (tarot) The twenty-second trump or major arcana card of the tarot.
  11. (informal) A great amount.
    Taking a break from work seems to have done her a world of good.
    You're going to be in a world of trouble when your family finds out.
    That new wallpaper has made a world of difference downstairs.
  12. (archaic) Age, era
    • 1610, The Second Tome of the Holie Bible, […] (Douay–Rheims Bible), Doway: Lavrence Kellam, […], OCLC 1006139495 ↗, Psalmes 144:13, page 257 ↗:
      Thy kingdom is a kingdom of al worldes: and thy domnion in al generation and generation.
Synonyms Translations Translations Translations Translations Translations Verb

world (worlds, present participle worlding; past and past participle worlded)

  1. To consider or cause to be considered from a global perspective; to consider as a global whole, rather than making or focussing on national or other distinctions; compare globalise.
    • 1996, Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A feminist international politics, pages ix-x:
      There are by now many feminisms (Tong, 1989; Humm, 1992). [...] They are in shifting alliance or contest with postmodern critiques, which at times seem to threaten the very category 'women' and its possibilities for a feminist politics. These debates inform this attempt at worlding women—moving beyond white western power centres and their dominant knowledges (compare Spivak, 1985), while recognising that I, as a white settler-state woman, need to attend to differences between women, too.
    • 2005, James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry, published by Stanford University Press, ISBN 978-0804750714:
      In a sense, the dictatorship was a failure of failure and, on that account, it was perhaps the exemplary system of control. Having in 1933 wagered on the worlding of the world in the regime's failure, Heidegger after the war can only rue his opportunistic hopes for an exposure of the ontological foundations of control.
  2. To make real; to make worldly.



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