What the word does now
Worth in present-day English is both a noun of value and an adjective of comparison. The noun covers a market price, a quantity that a sum will buy, a person’s accumulated assets, and the less numerical quality of merit. The adjective compares two things without an extra linking word: a house is worth a given sum, a plan is worth the work, a fortune is worth millions. Some linguists, notably Joan Maling in 1983, treat that frame as prepositional. Most desk dictionaries still label the word an adjective that governs a noun with prepositional force. The argument is about syntax, not about where the form came from.
The origin of the word worth is a native Germanic story, not a later overlay from French or Latin.
Inherited, not borrowed
Old English already had weorþ, also written weorð, wurþ, and wyrþ, as both adjective and noun. The adjective meant of value, honored, of high rank, and also suitable or proper. The noun named the price of a commodity, an equivalent amount, and personal worthiness. The Oxford English Dictionary records the noun, and the adjective beside it, in the Old English period, before 1150.
Middle English settled on the spelling worth. Around 1200 the adjective is attested as a quasi-preposition: equivalent to, valued at, equal in importance or power. That is the construction still heard in worth ten dollars and worth doing. The same century also uses the noun for excellence and nobility. None of this required a loan; the stem simply stayed in the language while its grammar tightened around a following noun or clause.
Cognates confirm a shared Germanic inheritance rather than a local invention. Old Frisian had werth, Old Norse verðr, Dutch has waard, Old High German werd, modern German wert, Gothic wairþs. Lookalikes outside the family are a different matter. Old Church Slavonic vredu and Lithuanian vertas are generally classed as loans from Germanic. Polish wart and Ukrainian вартий came later from German. Welsh gwerth is sometimes derived independently from a Celtic price-and-exchange development of the same older root, and sometimes grouped with Germanic influence; popular handbooks do not settle that point.
The Germanic stem, and an uncertain deeper step
The reconstructed Proto-Germanic adjective is *werþaz, “worthy, valuable,” reached in West Germanic as *werþ. The English noun is built from that adjective, not the reverse. Later English added worthy with the familiar -y ending, then worthless, worthwhile, and self-worth. The dental consonant is part of the old stem. It is not the same suffix that turns wide into width, even if those English abstracts also use a dental.
Beyond Germanic the sources part company. American Heritage and Watkins’s root list attach both the value-word and the old verb weorðan, “to become,” to a Proto-Indo-European root *wer- meaning to turn or bend. Several etymological handbooks reconstruct PIE *wert- “to turn, wind,” then posit a hop from turning toward a counterpart, or from the idea of exchange, to equivalence. Ranko Matasović and Vladimir Orel support a link through exchange, a path also proposed for Celtic. Guus Kroonen leaves the deeper origin of *werþa- open. Dirk Boutkan finds no Indo-European etymology. The Germanic word itself is not in doubt. The story that value began as a turn is a hypothesis, and serious dictionaries now mark that uncertainty.
A second Old English verb, weorðan “to become, to befall,” from Proto-Germanic *werþaną, is easier to gloss as “to turn into.” It was once a workhorse of the language. Middle English worthen meant to come into being. German still uses werden as its ordinary verb of becoming; Dutch keeps worden. English let the verb die except in the fossil woe worth the day, a present subjunctive meaning may woe befall, known from the late thirteenth century and still printed in the 1611 text of Ezekiel. Whether that verb and the value-adjective share one Indo-European root is the same open question.
Price, rank, and the modern ledger
Old English already mixed coin and honor. Weorþ could be the price paid for a thing and the standing of a person. Around 1200 the noun also covers excellence. By the 1590s it can mean a person’s wealth, goods, and means, the sense that later yields net worth. The moral reading never vanished: a person of worth is still judged by merit, not only by assets.
Two later colloquial frames keep the old idea of an equivalent and then stretch it. For what it’s worth, a hedge that offers a remark while shrinking its claim, is recorded by 1872. For all it’s worth, to the fullest extent, appears by 1874 in California newspapers and may have been gamblers’ talk. Older adjectival senses of noble and merely fit have mostly gone. Scots still allows a broader valuable, worthwhile use that standard English now covers with the compound worthwhile.
The grammar of the modern adjective is the surviving piece of that history. When speakers say a proposal is worth considering, they are still using the Middle English quasi-preposition: an old Germanic stem that measures one thing against another without needing of or for in between.
What German still holds in plain view
German keeps both pieces visible: Wert for value, werden for become. English kept the first and spent the second. The leftover phrase woe worth the day is not decoration. It is a subjunctive of a verb that once meant to turn into whatever arrived. That fossil dates the word more firmly than any tidy prehistoric tale, and it shows how much of the old grammar English has already used up.