Rarest

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˈɹɛɹəst/

Definitions

1. The condition of being infrequently observed or encountered
2. Characterizing something that is not widely available or found in large numbers
3. Describes something that appears or happens only occasionally or in very few instances ; Refers to an object or phenomenon that exists in very small quantities or is scarcely distributed

Etymology: Rarest is simply the superlative of "rare," so its story is really the story of the base adjective. The most surprising part is that "rare" arrived in English from Old French, which had taken it from Latin "rārus," meaning "loose, spaced apart, thin, infrequent." The sense of thinness is the original picture: something rare was something with gaps in it, not something hard to find. English already had its own words for scarcity before "rare" came along. Old English "geason" and "seld" (along with "seldsēne") covered the same ground, and "rare" largely displaced them in Middle English. "Seld" survives in modern English only as a fossil word, and "geason" is almost forgotten, which means the superlative you are using replaced a native vocabulary rather than a Latin gap. Separately, a different word, "rare" meaning "underdone," comes from Old English "hrēr," tied to a verb meaning "to stir." That sense is a dialectal variant of "rear," and it is unrelated in origin to the scarcity sense, though the two are now spelled and pronounced identically.

Synonyms: least common, uncommon, scarce, infrequent, exceptional

Antonyms: common, frequent, usual, ordinary, regular