How do the native speakers usually point to a respectful individual? For me, only three self-made sentences comes to mind; I was wondering if someone could let me know which one of them works better here:
He is deserving of respect.
He is respectworthy.
He is a respect-worthy individual.
On Google Ngram, I googled the following three expressions
deserving of respect, is respectworthy and is respect-worthy
and found out that the adjective "respect-worthy" is not used in the way I have used them. How I made these two latter ones? Once I read them in a dictionary and wrote them down in a paper.
All these matters aside, I need to know if the adjective I mentioned above is used in contemporary English these days or it is something that only dictionaries recommend it.
Also, some other dictionaries have no idea about this word or at least they did not provide any examples like here or here.
Best Answer
There are many synonyms for "respect": esteem, admire, honor, revere, venerate, hold in high regard, think highly of, defer to, endorse, and many others. So you have a number of options.
Specifically using "respect", these would be examples of the more common expressions:
Saying someone "deserves respect" often implies that the person isn't currently getting a lot of respect. For example, someone might say:
Which implies that you currently don't respect him as that person thinks you should. So it's actually kind of the opposite of saying someone is "widely respected".
"Respect-worthy" is not natural English. You might think the adjective "respectable" would fit, but actually it doesn't really mean "someone who is respected" but rather just "someone of good social standing" or simply "of a reasonably high level", "well above average", or "decent".
Of course there are many other ways to say someone is respected (or worthy of respect). This is not a comprehensive list, but I would start with the four patterns I provided.