Welcome to Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! Keep your brain in gear by learning new words all year. Let's get the year started by learning something new about a word that's familiar to you:
Nice: Nice has undergone a complete change in meaning since it came into English late in the 13th century. Deriving from the Latin nescius, "ignorant", nice originally meant "foolish or simple-minded", and came to mean "wanton or ill-mannered" before another century had passed. By the early 1400s, nice was being used for "extravagant dress", but before the century was out "extravagant dress" (as is so often the case in the world of fashion) had changed to "fashionable dress" and by Shakespeare's time nice meant "fastidious and refined". It took another 100 years or so before "refined" yielded to "agreeably delightful", this definition first recorded in 1769. -- "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins", Robert Hendrickson, Checkmark Books, 1997.
Isn't it nice to learn something new about a word you thought you knew?
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