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silly

Pronunciation: /ˈsɪl.i/

The English word “silly” has 20 meanings listed here.

adjective

  1. Laughable or amusing through foolishness or a foolish appearance.
  2. Absurdly large.
  3. Good; pious.
  4. Holy.
  5. Pitiful, inspiring compassion, particularly
  6. Innocent; suffering undeservedly, especially as an epithet of lambs and sheep.
  7. Helpless, defenseless.
  8. Insignificant, worthless, (chiefly Scotland) especially with regard to land quality.
  9. Weak, frail; flimsy (use concerning people and animals is now obsolete).
  10. Sickly; feeble; infirm.
  11. Rustic, homely.
  12. Lowly, of humble station.
  13. Rustic, uneducated, unlearned.
  14. Thoughtless, lacking judgment.
  15. mentally delayed or feeble.
  16. Stupefied, senseless; stunned or dazed.
  17. Very close to the batsman, facing the bowler; closer than short.

adverb

  1. Sillily: in a silly manner.

noun

  1. A silly person.
  2. A term of address.

Etymology

From Middle English seely, sēlī, from Old English sǣliġ, ġesǣliġ (“lucky, fortunate”), from Proto-West Germanic *sālīg, from *sāli; equivalent to seel (“happiness, bliss”) + -y. Doublet of Seelie. The semantic evolution is “lucky” to “innocent” to “naive” to “foolish”. Compare the similar evolution of daft (originally meaning “accommodating”), and almost the reverse with nice (originally meaning…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.