Rarest

How to spell rarest

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rarest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rarest mean?

1. adjectiveLeast often found or occurring; the most uncommon of a group.

Rarest in a sentence

• This stamp is the rarest item in his entire collection.

• The museum displays one of the rarest coins ever minted.

Where does rarest come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the superlative form of 'rare', which English took from the Old French 'rer' or 'rare' in the late 1300s, itself drawn from the Latin 'rarus'. In Latin 'rarus' literally meant 'thin', 'loose', or 'widely spaced', describing things scattered far apart rather than packed together, and from that physical idea grew the modern sense of something seldom found or hard to come by. The same Latin root gives us 'rarefy', meaning to make less dense, which preserves the original 'thin' meaning more openly. The superlative is built in the ordinary English way by adding '-est', and because 'rare' already ends in a single vowel-plus-'e', the spelling simply drops the silent 'e' before the suffix, giving 'rarest' with one 'r' in the middle, not two.

How the word is built

• rar- (from Latin rarus: thin, sparse, uncommon)
• -est (superlative suffix)