[1] Worrell was born in Toledo and attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, graduating with an A.B.
He then pursued graduate studies in America and Europe, receiving a Ph.D. at the University of Strassburg in 1909.
Between 1910 and 1924, he was at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, initially as an instructor in Oriental Languages and Hellenistic Greek and later as Professor and of Phonetics.
He moved to the Middle East, where he studied several dialects of Arabic, and, in 1919, he was appointed director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem.
Worrell returned to Michigan in 1925 and was chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages and.