Word History: Nice
“Have a nice day!” You have probably heard this expression many times since you came to the U.S., and you know it is intended to have a pleasant meaning. Nowadays the word nice means pleasant, attractive, friendly or good. But it didn’t start out that way. Nice is a very old word whose meaning has changed a lot over the centuries.
Back in Roman times the word was nescius, meaning ignorant. (The “ne” meant “not,” and the “scius” meant knowledge – we get our word science from it.) So “nescius” meant not knowing something.
Around 1300 A.D., the word showed up in French, having changed its form to nice. At that time nice meant “silly” or “simple,” which is not too far from the original Latin meaning. Around that time “nice” also came into Middle English, with a different meaning of “foolish” or “lascivious” – i.e., sexual in a dirty way. One writer of that period talked about greed being a “nice sin.”
By Shakespeare’s time, around 1600, the meaning of nice had changed again, to mean “fussy or precise.” That is what Shakespeare meant when he wrote in his play Henry V, “Wherefore stand you on nice points?” Modern English still uses that meaning when we speak of someone making a nice distinction.
At the end of the 18th century nice acquired its present favorable meaning. The great English novelist Jane Austen was one of the first writers to use it this way; one of her characters in Northanger Abbey says, “Nice is a very nice word indeed!” Indeed, the characters in that book debate whether nice is an acceptable word after one of them, Catherine, has used it in the sense of fine, great. Finally Catherine says, “I am sure I did not mean to say anything wrong, but it is a nice book, and why should I not call it so?” And from then on, the word has meant what it means today.
So have a nice day, and don’t worry about using this word. It means perfectly good and favorable things for everyone now.