Cheerful

How to spell cheerful

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cheerful

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cheerful mean?

1. adjectiveNoticeably happy and good-humoured in mood or manner.

Cheerful in a sentence

• The nurse stayed cheerful even during the long night shift.

• A cheerful greeting from the receptionist set the tone for the meeting.

Where does cheerful come from?

Language of origin: French

The word is built from the noun 'cheer' plus the common adjective suffix '-ful', meaning 'full of'. 'Cheer' itself reached English through Old French 'chiere', which meant 'face' or 'facial expression', and that came from the Late Latin 'cara', meaning 'face', a word with deeper roots in Greek 'kara', meaning 'head'. Originally 'cheer' simply described how someone looked: you could have a sad cheer or a glad one, and only later did the word narrow to mean the gladness itself. By the late 1300s 'cheerful' was being used to mean 'full of good spirits', and that cheerful face sense still lingers in the modern meaning. The spelling trap is the doubled 'e' followed by the silent-feeling 'r', plus remembering it ends in a single 'l' because '-ful' the suffix always takes one 'l'.

How the word is built

• cheer (gladness, good spirits)
• -ful (adjective suffix: full of)