Malice
nounThe intention or desire to do harm to someone, or active ill will toward another person.
How to spell malice
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce malice
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does malice mean?
- nounThe intention or desire to do harm to someone, or active ill will toward another person.
Malice in a sentence
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The court found that she had acted with deliberate malice toward her former partner.
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He bore no malice against the colleague who had taken his old job.
Where does malice come from?
Language of origin: Latin
Malice comes from the Latin noun malitia, which meant 'badness' or 'wickedness' and was built on the adjective malus, meaning simply 'bad' or 'evil'. The added ending -itia turned that adjective into an abstract noun naming the quality itself, so malitia literally described the state of being bad. English picked up the word in the 1200s through Old French, where Latin malitia had become malice, narrowing in meaning to the deliberate wish to harm another person. The same Latin malus still lies behind a whole family of familiar words such as malevolent, malign, malady and malfunction, and recognising that 'mal' means 'bad' is a useful anchor for the spelling. The trap in malice is the unstressed second syllable, which sounds like '-iss' yet is spelled '-ice', exactly as in the related words justice and notice.
How the word is built
- mal- (bad, evil)
- -ice (noun-forming suffix from Latin -itia 'quality, state')
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