The Etymology of Worship
Worship is worth plus the suffix -ship, and for its first few centuries, that is exactly what it meant: the condition of being worthy, or the honour owed to a person of high standing. Old English weorþscipe carried no religious weight. You could worship a lord, a merchant, or a craftsman of renown — you were simply acknowledging their worth. The religious sense crept in during the Middle English period, when the word began to specialise: if ultimate worth belonged to God, then worship belonged to God too. By the fifteenth century, the religious meaning dominated, and the secular sense survived only in legal and civic formulas. British magistrates are still addressed as 'Your Worship', a title that preserves the original meaning like an insect in amber. The word is uniquely English — no other Germanic language built this particular compound. German uses Gottesdienst ('God-service') for worship, while Dutch has eredienst ('honour-service'). Only English fused the concept of worth with the suffix for a state of being and then handed the result to religion.