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amicable

UK/ˈæ.mɪ.kə.bəl/US/ˈæ.mɪ.kə.bəl/
adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,257 of 15,258neutralformal · an editor’s judgement

Amicable means friendly and without ill feeling. Two people who have parted, and are not going to make a scene about it.

The word lives in one phrase above all: an amicable divorce, an amicable settlement, an amicable separation. That is telling, since amicable is used precisely where things could have turned nasty and did not. It describes relations rather than people, so you do not usually call a person amicable. Its root is Latin amicus, a friend, which also gives English amiable, and amiable does describe people.

Definitions of amicable

  1. 1adjectiveamicableFriendly and free of hostility, especially after a dispute.C1

    “They reached an amicable agreement over the fence.”

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    amīcābilis — friendly

  2. Middle English

    amicable — agreeable; pleasant

  3. English, today

    amicable

From Middle English amicable (“agreeable; pleasant”), from Latin amīcābilis (“friendly”). a doublet of amiable.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 8 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

amicable in the wild

  • A pair of amicable numbers is a set of sociable numbers of order 2.

    Sociable number

  • The French Republic and the Republic of Vanuatu have long-standing bilateral relations which have varied over the years between tense and amicable.

    France–Vanuatu relations

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the amīcābilis family

amiableamicable

amicable — used about once every 13,270 pages · #12,257 · point at the bar for the others