Praise
verbTo express warm approval, admiration or commendation of someone or something.
How to spell praise
6 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce praise
What does praise mean?
- verbTo express warm approval, admiration or commendation of someone or something.
- nounThe expression of approval, admiration or commendation.
Praise in a sentence
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verb
The manager took a moment to praise the team for finishing ahead of schedule.
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noun
Her thoughtful report earned warm praise from the whole committee.
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verb
Critics continue to praise the novel for its careful, honest characters.
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noun
The restaurant won lavish praise in every review it received.
Where does praise come from?
Language of origin: French
This word travelled into English from the Old French verb preisier, meaning 'to value' or 'to set a price on', which itself came from the Late Latin pretiare. The Latin source was the noun pretium, meaning 'price, value or worth', the very same root that gave English 'price' and 'prize'. When the word arrived in the 1200s it carried the sense of appraising or assigning worth to something, and from valuing it highly came the modern meaning of expressing warm approval or commendation. The spiritual sense, offering glory to God, grew naturally out of declaring something supremely worthy. The shared ancestry with 'price' and 'prize' explains why all three keep similar shapes, and the trickiest trap is that praise sounds exactly like 'prays' and 'preys', so the meaning, not the sound, must guide the spelling.
How the word is built
- prais- (from Latin pretiare: to value, to set a price on)
- silent -e
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