Vice

How to spell vice

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce vice

What does vice mean?

1. nounImmoral or wicked behaviour, or a specific bad habit.
2. nounA clamping tool with two jaws that hold an object firmly while it is worked on.

Vice in a sentence

• Gambling was his only serious vice.

• He tightened the vice to hold the metal bar steady while filing it.

• The documentary explored crime and vice in the old port city.

• The carpenter clamped the plank in a vice before sawing the edge.

Where does vice come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The main sense of vice comes from the Latin vitium, which literally meant 'a fault, defect, or blemish', whether in an object, a person, or a piece of land. From that came the adjective vitiosus, and English took the noun through Old French vice during the 1200s, narrowing it to mean a moral failing or a habit of wrongdoing. The same root still drives the verb 'vitiate', meaning to spoil or weaken something. Curiously, the gripping tool called a vice has a completely separate ancestry: it traces to Latin vitis, meaning 'vine' or anything twisting, by way of Old French vis 'screw', which is why the clamping tool works by turning a thread. A third use, the prefix in 'vice president', comes from yet another Latin word, vice, meaning 'in place of', the source of 'instead'. These overlapping origins all landed on the same four letters, which is part of why the word feels so familiar.

How the word is built

• vice (from Latin vitium: fault, defect)