Worship (style)
honorific prefix
Worship is an honorific prefix for mayors, justices of the peace, peace commissioners, and magistrates in some present or former Commonwealth realms. In spoken address, these officials are addressed as Your Worship or referred to as His Worship, Her Worship, or Their Worship (French: Son Honneur). In Australia, all states now use Your Honour as the form of address for magistrates (the same as has always been used for judges in higher courts).
Etymology
The term worship implies that citizens give or attribute special worth or esteem (worthship) to their first-citizen or mayor.
The Right Worshipful
The Right Worshipful (The Rt Wpful., Rt. W or RW) is an honorific style of address for all lord mayors and mayors of specific cities including the original Cinque Ports (Sandwich, Hythe, Dover, Romney and Hastings). Some historic boroughs, such as Shrewsbury and Atcham in Shropshire, also address their mayors by this prefix. In India, the mayors of cities such as Bengaluru, Mysore and Chennai are addressed as Worshipful Mayor with robes and attire as for the Lord Mayor of the City of London. The style was done away with by the Government of Kerala and the mayors in Kerala are now referred to as Respected Mayor. In Australia, the lord mayors of Darwin, Northern Territory; Parramatta, New South Wales; Newcastle, New South Wales; and Wollongong, New South Wales are also styled thus.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Worship (style)” is honorific prefix. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Worship, style and honorific, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8036977. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Worship (style)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.