Niche

How to spell niche

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce niche

What does niche mean?

1. nounA specialised position, market, or activity that suits a particular person or product especially well.
2. nounA shallow recess in a wall, often built to hold a statue, vase, or ornament.
3. adjectiveAimed at or appealing to a narrow, specialised section of people rather than the mass market.

Niche in a sentence

• noun

  After years of general work she finally found her niche in technical editing.

• noun

  A marble statue stood in a niche beside the staircase.

• adjective

  The magazine covers a fairly niche interest in antique fountain pens.

• noun

  The company carved out a profitable niche supplying parts for vintage cars.

• noun

  They fitted a small reading lamp into the niche above the bed.

• adjective

  Streaming services now commission niche documentaries for small but loyal audiences.

Where does niche come from?

Language of origin: French

Niche came into English in the early 1600s straight from French, where it named a shallow recess set into a wall to hold a statue or ornament. The French noun grew out of the verb nicher, meaning 'to make a nest' or 'to nestle', and that verb traces back through Vulgar Latin nidicare to the Latin nidus, which simply meant 'a nest'. The link between a bird's nest and an architectural alcove is the shared idea of a small sheltered hollow that something fits snugly into, and that same image of a perfect fit later carried the word into ecology, where a species' niche is its ideal place in an ecosystem, and into business, where a niche is the specialised slot a product occupies. The relatives nestle and nest sit at the far end of the same family tree. The spelling keeps its French shape entirely, which is why the silent, vowel-heavy '-iche' ending traps writers who expect it to look the way it sounds.

How the word is built

• niche (a single unanalysable root borrowed whole from French; ultimately from Latin nidus 'nest', no English prefix or suffix)