Silly

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˈsɪ.li/

Definitions

1. Showing a lack of good judgment or sense often resulting in foolish or nonsensical actions or thoughts
2. Exhibiting a childlike or naive quality that leads to trivial or foolish behavior or ideas
3. Marked by a lighthearted or frivolous demeanor that disregards practical concerns or seriousness

Etymology: An Anglo-Saxon who called you "sǣlig" was calling you lucky. Over the better part of six centuries that compliment wore down, step by small step, until it meant a fool, and the slide is one of the clearest cases in English of a word for good fortune going bad. Old English "sǣlig", also "gesǣlig", meant fortunate, happy, blessed. It was built on "sǣl", good fortune or happiness, plus the adjective ending that became modern "-y". It was inherited, not borrowed, and belonged to a family spread across the Germanic languages: Old Norse "sæll", Old High German "salig", Gothic "sels". The German relative "selig" still means blessed or blissful, and Germans use it when speaking of the dead, much as English says "the late". In Middle English the word became "sely" or "seely", and the luck it named took on a spiritual cast: to be seely was to be blessed, even holy. Then the drift began. The blessed are innocent; the innocent are harmless; the harmless are easily hurt, and so deserve pity. By around 1400 the form with a shortened vowel, "silly", had appeared, meaning pitiable. Pity shaded into lowliness and weakness, and weakness of body into weakness of mind. By the 1570s the word could mean feeble in reason, lacking sense, foolish. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries writers used it in so many overlapping senses that it is often impossible to tell whether a particular silly person was innocent, wretched, humble or simply dim. The older meanings held on longest in Scotland and the north of England, where "holy", "lowly" and "innocent" survived into early modern times. The Scots form "seelie" kept the blessing intact and gave folklore the Seelie Court: the fairies who were fortunate and kindly toward humans, as opposed to the Unseelie Court, who were not. The surname Seely preserves the old spelling. "Daft" travelled the same downhill road, beginning as a word for someone mild and accommodating. "Nice" went almost exactly the other way: it started out meaning ignorant and ended up as praise.

Synonyms: foolish, absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous, laughable

Antonyms: serious, sensible, practical, thoughtful, wise