A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of mobile hosts that can communicate with each other without the assistance of base stations. In MANETs, the high mobility of mobile nodes is a major reason for link failures. In this paper, we propose a stable weight-based on-demand routing protocol (SWORP) for MANETs. The proposed scheme uses the weight-based route strategy to select a stable route in order to enhance system performance. The weight of a route is decided by three factors: the route expiration time, the error count, and the hop count. Route discovery usually find multiple routes from the source node to the destination node. Then we select the path with the largest weight value for routing. Experimental results show that the proposed SWORP outperforms DSR and AODV especially in the high mobility environment.