Ease

How to spell ease

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ease

What does ease mean?

1. nounA state of comfort, or freedom from difficulty, effort, or worry.
2. verbTo make something less severe or difficult, or to move slowly and carefully.

Ease in a sentence

• noun

  She answered every question with surprising ease.

• verb

  A warm bath can ease the tension in your shoulders.

• noun

  The new software lets staff process invoices with ease.

• verb

  The new bypass should ease the traffic through the town centre.

Where does ease come from?

Language of origin: French

This word arrived in English in the early 1200s from Old French aise, which meant 'comfort', 'convenience', or 'elbow room'. The deeper origin of aise is debated, but it is often traced to the Latin phrase or notion of adjacens, 'lying nearby', the idea being that having things close at hand is what makes life comfortable. From the start the English word carried two linked ideas: a state of physical or mental comfort, and freedom from difficulty or effort. The same Old French root gave us the opposite word 'disease', which originally meant simply 'lack of ease' or 'discomfort' before it narrowed to mean illness. The spelling keeps the French 'ea' vowel pairing, which is the small trap, since the word sounds like a simple long 'e'.

How the word is built

• ease (from Old French aise: comfort, opportunity); a single root word with no prefix or suffix