nice
/naɪs/adjective, adverb
pleasant, kind, or carefully precise
From Proto-Indo-European ne- (not) + Latin sciō (know).
Lineage
ne-
sciō
The story
Nice began life nowhere near pleasant: Latin nescius meant “not knowing,” so an ignorant person could be called nice. French carried it across the Channel, and Middle English nyce still meant foolish or silly in the late thirteenth century. Then the word wandered through “timid,” “fussy,” “delicate,” and “precise” before arriving at “agreeable” in 1769 and “kind” around 1830. Jane Austen gleefully noticed this semantic all-purpose tool in Northanger Abbey (1803), where “nice” describes a book, a day, a walk, and two young women. Its family tree also reaches science: both the ignorant nescius and the learned scientist revolve around the Latin idea of knowing—one says “not know,” the other says “know,” making nice a tiny historical fossil of ignorance turned into praise.
Modern usage
A filler or approving response, sometimes used after hearing the number 69.
- Heard in
- informal conversation · internet slang
- See
- Urban Dictionary entries for filler usage and the “69” response
Words from the same roots
sciō · Latin, ‘know’
Derivedscience, conscious, omniscient, prescience, nescient