nice

A word that meant the opposite

When nice arrived in English in the 1200s it meant foolish or simple-minded, and that sense persisted for three hundred years. Chaucer uses it for folly and for wantonness; a fourteenth-century writer could call someone nice and mean that they were stupid or morally loose. Every later sense is a weakening of the original insult.

The path from foolish to fastidious ran through a middle sense of "strange" or "shy", and it makes a kind of sense: someone who does not know is awkward, someone awkward is over-particular, someone over-particular is precise. By the 1600s nice had become almost a term of praise for accuracy — a nice observer was a careful one, a nice distinction a fine one.

The eighteenth-century collapse

The final shift happened in the 1700s, when nice began to be used as a general word of approval for almost anything. Contemporaries noticed and disliked it: critics complained that nice had become the laziest adjective in the language, applied to food, weather, people and ideas without distinguishing between them.

They were right about the vagueness and wrong about the outcome. Nice settled into the slot it occupies today, the mildest possible positive. Its older senses survive only in a handful of fixed phrases — a nice distinction, nice and early — where the meaning depends entirely on the context.

• 1200s–1400s — foolish, wanton, simple
• 1400s–1500s — strange, shy, coy
• 1500s–1600s — fastidious, over-particular
• 1600s–1700s — precise, subtle, finely judged (a nice distinction)
• 1700s–present — pleasant, agreeable (the sense condemned as vague at the time)
• fixed survivals — nice and early, a nice point, nice work

The same root without the bleaching

The Latin source of nice has fared very differently elsewhere. Nescius was built from ne plus scire, "not to know", and the scire half produced a large and stable family: science, conscience, conscious, omniscient, prescient. None of those words moved an inch from "knowing".

Nescient itself survives in English as an exact synonym of ignorant, unchanged in meaning since Latin. So the same root produced both the most precise vocabulary in the language and its vaguest adjective, which is a good illustration of how differently borrowed words can behave.