Definition of "world"

world

/wɜːld/

noun
countable and uncountable, plural worlds
1. (with "the" or a plural possessive pronoun) The subjective human experience, regarded collectively; human collective existence; existence in general.
2. (with "the" or a singular possessive pronoun) The subjective human experience, regarded individually.
  Quotations
  The world was awake to the 2nd of May, but Mayfair is not the world, and even the menials of Mayfair lie long abed. As they turned into Hertford Street they startled a robin from the poet's head on a barren fountain, and he fled away with a cameo note.
  1922, Michael Arlen, “Ep./4/2”, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days
  Eustace gaped at him in amazement. When his urbanity dropped away from him, as now, he had an innocence of expression which was almost infantile. It was as if the world had never touched him at all.
  1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 9, in The China Governess‎
  America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 ([…]): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.
  2013 June 1, “Towards the end of poverty”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 11
3. (metonymically, with "the") A majority of people.
4. The Universe.
5. (uncountable, with "the") The Earth, especially in a geopolitical or cultural context.
  Quotations
  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.
  1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company
  Earless ghost swift moths become “invisible” to echolocating bats by forming mating clusters close […] above vegetation and effectively blending into the clutter of echoes that the bat receives from the leaves and stems around them. Many insects probably use this strategy, which is a close analogy to crypsis in the visible world—camouflage and other methods for blending into one’s visual background.
  2013 May-June, William E. Conner, “An Acoustic Arms Race”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3, pages 206–7
  She says the Third Pole is one of the world’s largest sources of fresh drinking water.
  2018, VOA Learning English > China's Melting Glacier Brings Visitors, Adds to Climate Concerns‎
6. (countable) A planet, especially one which is inhabited or inhabitable.
  Quotations
  A third is wroth: ‘Is this an hour […]A time to sicken and to swoon,⁠When Science reaches forth her arms⁠To feel from world to world, and charmsHer secret from the latest moon?’
  1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], In Memoriam, London: Edward Moxon, […], canto XXI, page 35
  And They said to Kib: “What are these things that move upon The Earth yet move not in circles like the Worlds, that regard like the Moon and yet they do not shine?”
  1905, [Edward Plunkett,] Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegāna‎, London: Elkin Mathews, […]
  Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.
  1970, Larry Niven, Ringworld, page 118
  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.
  2007 September 27, Marc Rayman (interviewee), “NASA's Ion-Drive Asteroid Hunter Lifts Off”, National Public Radio
  1. (by extension) Any other astronomical body which may be inhabitable, such as a natural satellite.
7. A very large extent of country.
8. In various mythologies, cosmologies, etc., one of a number of separate realms or regions having different characteristics and occupied by different types of inhabitants.
  Quotations
  Frey [...] clambered up on to the Hildskjalf, the throne from which Odin could see everything that happened across the nine worlds.
  2017, Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 182
9. A fictional realm, such as a planet, containing one or multiple societies of beings, especially intelligent ones.
10. An individual or group perspective or social setting.
  Quotations
  According to this saga of intellectual-property misanthropy, these creatures [patent trolls] roam the business world, buying up patents and then using them to demand extravagant payouts from companies they accuse of infringing them. Often, their victims pay up rather than face the costs of a legal battle.
  2013 June 8, “Obama goes troll-hunting”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8839, page 55
11. (computing) The part of an operating system distributed with the kernel, consisting of the shell and other programs.
12. (video games) A subdivision of a game, consisting of a series of stages or levels that usually share a similar environment or theme.
13. (tarot) The twenty-second trump or major arcana card of the tarot.
14. (informal, singular or plural, followed by "of") A great amount.
15. (archaic) Age, era.
  Quotations
  Thy kingdom is a kingdom of al worldes: and thy domnion in al generation and generation.
  1610, The Second Tome of the Holie Bible, […] (Douay–Rheims Bible), Doway: Lavrence Kellam, […], Psalmes 144:13, page 257
verb
third-person singular simple present worlds, present participle worlding, simple 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.
  Quotations
  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.
  1996, Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A feminist international politics, page ix-x
  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.
  2005, James Phillips, Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry, Stanford University Press
2. To make real; to make worldly.