Ace

How to spell ace

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ace

What does ace mean?

1. nounA playing card or die face marked with a single spot, often ranking highest in card games.
2. nounA person who is highly skilled or excels at a particular activity.
3. verbTo do extremely well at something, especially to pass a test with top marks.
4. nounIn tennis, a serve that the opponent fails to touch, winning the point outright.

Ace in a sentence

• noun

  She drew the ace of spades from the top of the deck.

• noun

  The new accountant is an ace with complicated tax returns.

• verb

  She studied all weekend so she could ace the final exam.

• noun

  His powerful serve produced an ace that the receiver never reached.

• noun

  In this game the ace counts as the highest card.

• noun

  He became the team ace after winning three matches in a row.

Where does ace come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This little word travelled into English from the Old French as, the name for the side of a die marked with a single spot, and that in turn came straight from the Latin as, which named the smallest Roman unit of weight and a low-value bronze coin. The underlying idea throughout was 'a single thing' or 'oneness', which is why the one-spot card or die face carried the name. English picked it up in the 1300s, originally with overtones of the lowest or least valuable throw in dice. Over the centuries the sense flipped dramatically: in many card games the single-spot card became the highest rather than the lowest, and by the early twentieth century 'ace' came to mean a top performer, first a fighter pilot with many victories and then any expert. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed simple and stable, which is unusual for a word with such a tangled change of meaning.

How the word is built

• ace (a single, indivisible unit; from Latin as, a unit or coin)