A coastal town in West Sussex, England, known as a seaside resort, or the present participle of the verb 'worth,' meaning to have value or merit.
From Old English 'weorð' meaning 'enclosure' or 'homestead,' combined with the suffix '-ing' indicating a place. The town name refers to a settlement of people worthy or associated with a certain place. Over time, it became primarily known as a place name for the English seaside town.
Worthing is a perfect example of how English place names encode their origins—the '-ing' suffix was used in Anglo-Saxon times to mean 'settlement of the people of,' so Worthing literally means 'settlement of Weorða's people.' This naming pattern created thousands of English town names and reveals how medieval communities identified themselves through ancestry and land ownership.
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