Nicest
adjectiveMost pleasant, agreeable, or kind of a group.
How to spell nicest
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce nicest
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does nicest mean?
- adjectiveMost pleasant, agreeable, or kind of a group.
Nicest in a sentence
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That café serves the nicest coffee in town.
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Of all her colleagues, he was by far the nicest to the new staff.
Where does nicest come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This is the superlative of 'nice', and the journey of 'nice' is one of the most dramatic meaning shifts in English. It came from the Latin nescius, which literally meant 'ignorant' or 'not knowing', built from the negative ne 'not' and scire 'to know'. English borrowed it through Old French around the 1300s, when it carried the unflattering sense of 'foolish' or 'silly'. Over the following centuries the meaning drifted through 'fussy' and 'precise' before finally settling on the warm modern sense of 'pleasant' or 'agreeable' by the 1700s. The superlative form simply adds the regular Old English ending -est, the same suffix that turns 'fast' into 'fastest', so the only real spelling point is that the silent 'e' of nice is dropped before the ending.
How the word is built
- nice (pleasant, agreeable)
- -est (superlative suffix)
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