worldly

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for worldly is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɜː(ɹ)ldli/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,738 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for worldly, with forms such as "owrldly", "wolrdly", and "wordlly". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 6 confusable-pair relationships, "worlds", "world", "wordy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English worldly, worldlich, wordly (adjective), from Old English woruldlīċ, worldlīċ, weoroldlīċ (“worldly; earthly; temporal; mundane; secular”), from Proto-Germanic *weraldilīkaz, equivalent to world + -ly. Cognate with Dutch wereldlijk (“worl… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is worldly, spelled W-O-R-L-D-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.