nice

What it means today

1. Pleasant, agreeable. Merriam-Webster’s second sense is “pleasing, agreeable”, and its first is “polite, kind”.5 Wiktionary marks this use as chiefly informal and dates it from the 18th century.3A nice time.
2. Of a person: kind, friendly. Wiktionary lists this separately, also from the 18th century.3She’s very nice.
3. Exact, fine, delicate. Still alive in a few set phrases. Merriam-Webster gives “possessing, marked by, or demanding great or excessive precision”, as in a nice distinction between two words.5A nice distinction.
4. As a mild intensifier. In nice and warm, nice and early, the word only says that the second adjective is welcome. Wiktionary calls this chiefly informal.3 Etymonline notes that it kept an older sense, “precise, careful”, in such phrases.2The soup is nice and hot.

In sentences

• That’s nice of you to say.5
• Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice, / Curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice. Alexander Pope, quoted under nice by Samuel Johnson, 1755. Here nice is a fault: fussy.7
• It is a very nice word indeed! Henry Tilney in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, 1818. See the page at the top of this article.1

Words that sit nearby

nicety

A fine point, an exact detail. Etymonline says it first meant “folly, stupidity” in the late 14th century and then followed the same path as nice.10

nicely

Merriam-Webster lists it as a derived form of nice.5

nescient

“Ignorant”. From the Latin verb nescire, “not to know”, the same verb that gave nice its start.10

Nice

The French city is not related. Etymonline traces it to Greek nikaios, “victorious”.2

Synonyms and antonyms for nice

Synonyms

• Pleasantpleasant, delightful, enjoyable, pleasing, good, satisfying, welcome, pleasurable, comfortable.6
• Of a person, graciousfriendly, amiable, kind, polite, agreeable, gentle, thoughtful, courteous, considerate, likable.6
• Polite, properpolite, proper, respectable, acceptable, decent, correct, genteel, seemly.6
• Careful, hard to pleaseparticular, fastidious, finicky, picky, dainty, choosy, fussy, exacting.6
• Subtle, exactsubtle, fine, delicate, exact, minute, nuanced, refined, meticulous.6
• Honorablehonorable, good, honest, ethical, decent, moral, worthy, upright, virtuous.6

Antonyms

Which word is the opposite depends on which nice you mean. The Merriam-Webster thesaurus lists, sense by sense, antonyms and near antonyms:6

• Pleasantunpleasant, disagreeable, unwelcome, miserable, horrid, boring, offensive.6
• Of a person, graciousunpleasant, disagreeable, ungracious, rude, unkind, impolite, surly.6
• Polite, properimproper, inappropriate, unacceptable, indecent, unseemly, informal, casual.6
• Careful, hard to pleaseflexible, relaxed, undemanding, breezy, lenient, permissive, laid-back.6
• Subtle, exactrough, coarse, obvious, plain, inexact, sloppy, careless.6

Through time

Few everyday words sit as far from where they started. Drag the line and read what people wrote at each step, from “foolish” to “fussy”, and on to “kind”.

How it traveled from Rome to England

1. ne + scireLatin, “not” and “to know”.23
2. nesciusLatin, “ignorant, not knowing”.3
3. niceOld French, 12th century: “careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish”.2
4. nyceMiddle English, “foolish, simple, ignorant”. The Middle English forms are nyce, nice, nys.34
5. niceModern English.

Stops mark where each language was used. Nobody documented a single journey, and the line is a picture of the word’s family tree. The Proto-Indo-European roots come from Etymonline’s entries for nice and science, and we haven’t checked them against an Indo-European dictionary.

How old is the word?

The dates differ because the books are dating different meanings. None of them is dating “pleasant”.

The date we could not check is the earliest written example itself. None of the dictionaries we could read prints the 13th-century sentence, and the Middle English Dictionary refused automated access. We have not seen the first text.

A claim checked: nice used to mean stupid

• The Latin source is nescius, “ignorant”.23 The Old French nice meant “simple, stupid, silly, foolish”.2 Etymonline’s first English definition, from the late 13th century, is “foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless”.2
• It did not stay there. Etymonline lists the steps: “timid, faint-hearted” before 1300, “fussy, fastidious” in the late 14th century, “dainty, delicate” about 1400, “precise, careful” in the 1500s, “agreeable, delightful” in 1769 and “kind, thoughtful” in 1830.2 Etymonline quotes the etymologist Ernest Weekley: “The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj.”2
• So the claim holds for the word’s first few centuries and fails for everything after. Chaucer, before 1400, sets nyce beside straunge, “strange”, which is not the plain “foolish” of the dictionaries.49 The word nicety, from the same source, was “folly, stupidity” in the late 14th century before it came to mean a fine point.10
• Neither great 18th and 19th century dictionary has it the way we use it. Johnson in 1755 has fussiness and exactness.7 Webster in 1828 lists “very pleasant to the taste” first and fastidious and delicate senses after it. He does not list “kind”.8
• Both also guessed the origin wrong. Johnson gives a Saxon word for “soft”, and Webster a German verb for eating sweets.78 Etymonline and Wiktionary both give Latin nescius.23

One more thing the sources agree on: the city of Nice has nothing to do with it. Etymonline traces the place name to Greek nikaios, “victorious”.2

The word, measured

Psychologists have asked thousands of people about tens of thousands of words. Here is where nice lands in six of those datasets.

Ratings come from panels of roughly 20 to 30 people per word, asked about the word out of context. Percentages are how nice ranks among the words in that dataset.

Its relatives

science

Same Latin verb, scire, “to know”. Etymonline gives science from Latin scientia, “knowledge”, and says nice is built on ne- plus the stem of scire.102

nescient

From Latin nescire, “not to know”. Early 15th century in English.10

nicety

Late 14th century, “folly, stupidity”; from Old French niceté.10

The word in other languages

We did not check descendants in other languages for this word, so we list none. The Old French nice is the one that matters for English.2

Three questions from this page

Where every claim comes from

We read the 1818 page, Johnson, Webster, Chaucer’s lines in the Gutenberg text and the data files ourselves, and calculated the numbers on this page from those files. Etymonline and Merriam-Webster block automated readers, so we read their Internet Archive copies. The Middle English Dictionary refused automated access and we did not open it. Material we know only through another writer is marked as such. Checked on 5 November 2026. If something is wrong, write to hello@lexicist.com.

1. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion. London: John Murray, 1818. Vol. 1, p. 254. Duke University Libraries copy, Internet Archive, no known restrictions as a work of 1818. archive.org/details/northangerabbeyp141aust
2. Harper, Douglas. “nice”. Online Etymology Dictionary. We read the Internet Archive copy of December 2024; the live site blocks automated access. etymonline.com/word/nice
3. Wiktionary, “nice”, English section. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice
4. Wiktionary, “nyce”, Middle English section. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nyce
5. Merriam-Webster, “nice”. We read the Internet Archive copy of 2024; the live site blocks automated access. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nice
6. Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, “nice”, Synonyms, Antonyms and Near Antonyms. Internet Archive copy of December 2024. merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/nice
7. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755. johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
8. Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 1828. webstersdictionary1828.com
9. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde, book 2, proem, lines 22 to 25. Project Gutenberg eBook 257. gutenberg.org/ebooks/257
10. Harper, Douglas. “nicety”, “nescient”, “science”. Online Etymology Dictionary, Internet Archive copies. etymonline.com/word/nicety
11. Brysbaert, M., et al. “Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 51 (2019): 467–479. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
12. Kuperman, V., et al. “Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words”. Behavior Research Methods 44 (2012): 978–990. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4
13. Brysbaert, M., et al. “Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 46 (2014): 904–911. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
14. Warriner, A. B., et al. “Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 45 (2013): 1191–1207. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x
15. Lynott, D., et al. “The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms”. Behavior Research Methods 52 (2020): 1271–1291. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z
16. Brysbaert, M., and B. New. “Moving beyond Kučera and Francis”. Behavior Research Methods 41 (2009): 977–990. doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.4.977
17. Google Books Ngram Viewer, English 2019 corpus, 1700–2022, smoothing 3. Open the chart. Method: Michel, J.-B., et al. Science 331 (2011): 176–182. doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644

Image and audio credits

1818 page: Duke University Libraries, via the Internet Archive. Public domain. Recording: Dvortygirl (US), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Map: Natural Earth, public domain.

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