“Nice” Was Once an Insult
Today, calling someone nice is a gentle compliment.
In medieval England, however, it could mean that the person was foolish or ignorant.
Nice entered English through Old French, but its deeper ancestor is the Latin nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing.” It came from ne-—“not”—and scire—“to know.”
When English adopted the word around the 13th century, nice described someone silly, foolish, or lacking knowledge.
Its meaning then wandered through a remarkable series of personalities. It came to mean extravagant, timid, delicate, fussy, and difficult to please.
From “fussy,” it developed the sense of being very precise or careful—an older meaning that survives when we speak of “a nice distinction” or “nice calculation.”
A person with refined judgment could then be considered agreeable or respectable. By the 19th century, nice had largely acquired its familiar positive meaning: pleasant, kind, or enjoyable.
Here is the surprising connection: the Latin verb scire, hidden inside nice, also gave us science—knowledge itself.
So nice began by describing someone without knowledge and ended up as one of the most agreeable words in English. Quite a nice transformation. Merriam-Webster
The English word science ultimately comes from the Latin verb scīre, meaning “to know.”
The development was:
scīre — to know
→ scientia — knowledge
→ Old French science
→ English science
Originally, science meant knowledge in general, not specifically the systematic study of the natural world. That narrower modern meaning developed gradually.
The same Latin root appears in several English words:
- Conscience: con- (“together”) + scīre (“to know”) — inner knowledge of right and wrong.
- Conscious: literally “knowing with” or “aware.”
- Omniscient: omni- (“all”) + scient (“knowing”) — all-knowing.
- Prescient: pre- (“before”) + scient (“knowing”) — knowing beforehand.
- Nescient: ne- (“not”) + scient (“knowing”) — ignorant.
That last word shares its ancestry with nice. Nice came from Latin nescius, meaning “not knowing” or “ignorant.”
So, strangely, science and nice are linguistic relatives: one began with “knowledge,” and the other with “not knowing.”
