Vibe

How to spell vibe

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce vibe

What does vibe mean?

1. nounThe general mood, atmosphere, or feeling that a person, place, or thing gives off.
2. verbTo get along well with someone or to enjoy a relaxed, harmonious mood.

Vibe in a sentence

• noun

  The new cafe has a relaxed vibe that makes it easy to work there.

• verb

  The two designers really vibe when they brainstorm together.

• noun

  Something about the contract gave him a bad vibe, so he asked a lawyer to review it.

• verb

  After a long week, they just want to vibe on the sofa with some music.

Where does vibe come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a clipped, informal form of 'vibration', a word that traces back to the Latin verb vibrare, meaning 'to shake, to set in trembling motion'. By the seventeenth century English used 'vibration' for the physical to-and-fro movement of a string or a wave, a strictly scientific idea. In the 1960s, against a backdrop of countercultural and quasi-mystical talk about the 'vibrations' people and places supposedly gave off, speakers shortened the term to the breezy 'vibe' and 'vibes' to mean the mood or feeling something radiates. The spelling keeps the silent final 'e' that signals the long 'i' sound, which is the only real point to watch. The word became fully mainstream slang by the twenty-first century and now also works as a casual verb.

How the word is built

• vibe (clipped from vibration: a shaking or oscillation)
• informal sense extension