Silly

How to spell silly

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce silly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does silly mean?

1. adjectiveShowing a lack of good sense; foolish or absurd in a lighthearted way.

Silly in a sentence

• It would be silly to leave the house without your keys.

• The meeting ended with a few silly jokes about the new logo.

Where does silly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Silly is one of those words whose meaning has wandered a remarkable distance from where it began. It descends from the Old English word sǣlig, which literally meant 'happy', 'blessed', or 'fortunate', and which is related to the German word selig, still meaning 'blessed' today. Over the medieval centuries the sense slid gently downhill: from 'blessed' it came to mean 'innocent' or 'harmless', then 'deserving of pity' or 'helpless', and by the 1500s it had settled into 'feeble' and finally 'foolish' or 'lacking good sense'. The spelling drifted along with the meaning, the older 'see-lig' sound shortening to the short 'i' we use now, which is why the modern word is spelled with a plain double l and a simple -y rather than anything resembling its dignified origin. For a fluent adult the word is rarely misspelled, the only mild trap being the doubled l.

How the word is built

• sill- (from Old English sǣlig: happy, blessed)
• -y (adjective suffix)