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by Liz Walter

It is common to see confusion between the words ‘worse’ and ‘worst’, so in today’s post, I am going to explain the difference and also talk about some useful phrases which contain these words.

Let’s start with worse, which is the comparative version of ‘bad’. We use it to compare two things, or to compare the state of something now with how it was before. We often use the phrases even worse and much worse:

The crowds are even worse in summer.

He managed to make a difficult situation much worse.

Note that when we name what we are comparing something with, we say worse than. A nice, emphatic way of saying that something is very bad is there’s nothing worse than:

Your cooking is even worse than mine.

There’s nothing worse than finding out you have been betrayed.

We often say that something becomes worse or, much more commonly, gets worse:

Her health became worse as she got older.

The cracks in the wall will get worse if you don’t fix them.

A nice phrase to use in anecdotes about a difficult situation is to make matters/things worse:

I was miles from home and, to make matters worse, I’d forgotten to bring my phone.

We’ll turn to worst now. This is the superlative form of ‘bad’, which means it describes something that is worse than anything else. It almost always has a determiner such as the or your in front of it:

That is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

I got my worst score on the last test.

The only time you don’t need a determiner is when ‘worst’ is part of a fixed phrase. For example, if we have listed several bad things, we might start the final thing with the phrase worst of all:

The soup was cold and the vegetables were hard. But worst of all, the chicken was undercooked.

If you fear/expect the worst, you think that something very bad is likely to happen. When we talk about what we might do if something very bad happens, we might introduce it with the phrase if the worst comes to the worst (UK English)/if worst comes to worst (US English):

I hadn’t heard from him for days, and I feared the worst.

If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll have to hire a good lawyer.

Finally, we probably all know someone whose actions or character cause most of their problems. The phrase be your own worst enemy is perfect for them!

He has problems at work, but he’s his own worst enemy – he just won’t stop criticizing his colleagues.

If you have found this post useful, you might also like to look back at my previous, more general post on forming comparatives and superlatives.