Kilo Lingo

#200 of 5,000 Core 1000

Translation

good

Examples

.

He is a good man.

.

I did this in good faith.

Melior .

Peace is better than war.

Optimus .

He was the best of them all.

bibimus.

We drank good wine.

Take the rank with a pinch of salt. sits at the tail of this list because of what our particular corpus happens to contain, not because it is a rare or advanced word: it is one of the first adjectives any Latin course teaches, and on most frequency lists it would be somewhere near the top. Treat it as a core word that landed here by accident of counting.

It is a first-and-second declension adjective and entirely regular in the positive: , , , , in the masculine, , , , , in the feminine, and in the neuter. The irregularity is all in the comparison, and it is suppletive, meaning the other degrees come from entirely different roots: comparative melior, , "better"; superlative optimus, optima, optimum, "best". The matching adverbs are , , optime. There is nothing to derive here, so learn , melior, optimus as a chant, the way you learn "good, better, best".

The neuter works as a noun: is "a good thing, a benefit", and the plural means "goods, property, an estate". Phrases you will meet constantly: , in good faith, which English took whole; , the Roman shorthand for a decent man; , the highest good, the target of every ancient ethical system. Descendants: Italian buono, Spanish bueno, French bon, with melior surviving intact as migliore, mejor and meilleur.

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bonus: worksheet, infographic and listicle

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This word is part of lesson 4.