Nice

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /naɪs/

Definitions

  1. Pleasant, agreeable, or satisfactory in nature or appearance
  2. Pleasant in manner or disposition, as well as agreeable or satisfactory in terms of quality or characteristics
  3. Exhibiting charm or attractiveness while also being agreeable or satisfactory in a particular context

Etymology: When it first entered English, around 1300, calling someone nice was no compliment. It meant they were a fool. The roots say so plainly. Latin "nescius" meant "ignorant, not knowing," built from "ne" ("not") and "scire" ("to know"), the verb behind "science." Old French made it a word for the simple, the foolish and the ignorant, and English borrowed it, spelled "nyce" or "nys." When Chaucer's Wife of Bath says women want to be thought wise and not "nyce," she is setting sense against silliness. Then the word wandered, one small step at a time. A fool can be frivolous or wanton, and it meant that. A fool can be shy, and it also meant timid. Shyness shades into fussiness, so by the late 1300s it meant fastidious and particular, then dainty and delicate. Someone that particular takes great care over small differences, and by the 1500s it meant precise and exact. That sense still survives in "a nice distinction," which means a fine one, not a pleasant one. Only in the eighteenth century did it start to mean agreeable or delightful, and by around 1830 it had reached kind and thoughtful. Along the way it became fashionable enough to annoy people. In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Catherine Morland calls a novel she loves "nice," and Henry Tilney pounces. He sarcastically applies the word to the day, their walk and the young ladies themselves: "it is a very nice word indeed! it does for every thing." The last turn came in computing. Early versions of Unix included a command that runs a program at lower priority, so that it takes less of the machine and leaves more for everyone else. It got its name because doing that is polite. A Latin word for ignorance had ended up naming a program that courteously waits its turn.

Synonyms: pleasant, agreeable, kind, friendly, lovely

Antonyms: unpleasant, mean, rude, disagreeable, nasty