Nice (pronounced nahys)
(1) Pleasing; agreeable; delightful.
(2) Amiably pleasant; kind.
(3) Characterized by, showing, or requiring great accuracy, precision, skill, tact, care, or delicacy.
(4) Showing or indicating very small differences; minutely accurate, as instruments.
(5) Minute, fine, or subtle.
(6) Having or showing delicate, accurate perception.
(7) Refined in manners, language etc.
(8) Virtuous; respectable; decorous.
(9) Suitable or proper; carefully neat in dress, habits, etc; dainty or delicate (especially of food).
(10) Having fastidious, finicky, or fussy tastes (sometime used as over-nice in a disparaging sense).
(11) Coy, shy, or reluctant (obsolete).
(12) Unimportant; trivial (obsolete).
(13) Uncertain; delicately balanced (obsolete).
(14) Wanton (obsolete).
(15) A Mediterranean port and the capital of the department of Alpes-Maritimes, in south-east France; a resort on the French Riviera; founded by Phocaeans from Marseille circa third century BC; it was ceded to France in 1860 by Sardinia. Ancient Nicaea is from the Ancient Greek nikaios (victorious) from nikē (victory); Nizzard (a resident of Nice) is derived from Nizza, the Italian form of the city name.
(16) In the UK, an acronym for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, a body established in 1999 to provide authoritative guidance on current best practice in medicine and to promote high-quality cost-effective medical treatment in the National Health Service (NHS).
(17) In computing (the Unix operating system), a program used to trigger a script or program with a specified priority.
(18) In the slang of drug users, being well affected.
1250–1300:
From the Middle English nice, nyce & nys (foolish, stupid), from the Old French nice, niche & nisce (silly,
simple, foolish, ignorant) from the Latin nescius
(to be ignorant, incapable), the construct being ne- (the Latin negative prefix) + sci- (stem of scīre (to
know)) + -us (the Latin adjectival
suffix); the more familiar Latin form being nescire
(to know not, be ignorant of), the construct being ne- + scire, the ultimate
source of which was the primitive Indo-European ne (not). Use of the noun "nice" is restricted to the Unix operating system, where it describes a program used to trigger a script or program with a specified priority, the implication being that running at a lower priority is "nice" (in the sense of "kind") because it leaves more resources for others (thus the specialized verbs nicing & niced). Nice is a noun, adjective & adverb, nicity is a noun, nicer & nicest are adjectives & adverbs, niceish (nicish the archaic spelling) is an adjective, nicely is an adverb and niceness & nicety are nouns; the most common noun plural seems to be niceties.
Not always nice
The sense development of nice is regarded as unusual by most etymologists, most of whom find the meaning shifts extraordinary, even for an adjective. Meaning originally “silly or foolish”, by circa 1300, it meant "timid, faint-hearted", came to mean "fussy or fastidious" by the late fourteenth century, shifting (slightly) within decades to "dainty, delicate" yet meaning "precise, careful" by the 1500s, the sense preserved in Modern English in such terms as “a nice distinction” and “nice and early”. By 1769 it’s being used to convey something "agreeable or delightful and by 1830, "kind & thoughtful" yet the variety of meanings clearly overlapped, perhaps due to generational inertia: the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), writing in 1815 of the recent battle of Waterloo which at many points could have gone either way said “It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”, using nice in yet another older sense of "uncertain, delicately balanced".
Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011. As early as the 1990s, some guides were predicting the use of "nice" to convey the sardonically ironic was becoming so clichéd it might become unfashionable but it continues to flourish, possibly because it has never become associated with "lower class" speech.
The meaning shifts have created problems for historians and archivists, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) noting that when analysing documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it can be difficult to say in what particular sense a writer intended "nice" to be taken. The imprecision upset many and by 1926, the authoritative Henry Fowler (1858–1933) wrote in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage that nice had become "too great a favourite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness." Pace Henry Fowler but it is handy for a language to include a word which so encapsulates “vague and mild agreeableness” and in any of its meanings, nice is not without synonyms. So the semantic history is varied and, as the etymology and the obsolete senses attest, any attempt to insist on only one of its present senses as correct will not be in keeping with actual use. The criticism usually extended is nice is used too often and has become a cliché lacking the qualities of precision and intensity that are embodied in many of its synonyms. In modern use, it’s now often used ironically, something not desirable, or worse, can now be described as “nice”, the meaning well-understood.
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