Beautiful is the big word for something that is a pleasure to look at. A face you keep glancing back at, a wedding dress on a hanger, the sky over the sea twenty minutes after the sun has gone.
It reaches past looks. Beautiful music, a beautiful pass in football, a beautiful piece of joinery — anything done so well it gives pleasure. It is stronger than pretty and far stronger than nice, so it lands with weight; spend it carefully and it keeps its force. Beauty is the noun, beautifully the adverb, beautify the rare verb for smartening a place up. English also says a beautiful day for weather that is simply clear and warm.
1adjectivebeautifulGiving great pleasure to look at.~88%
“She wore a beautiful blue coat with wooden buttons.”
2adjectivehearGiving great pleasure to hear, or done extremely well.~10%
“The slow movement is the most beautiful thing he wrote.”
3adjectiveweatherOf weather: clear, warm and bright.~2%
“It was a beautiful morning, so we walked into town.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: pretty, gorgeous
Beautiful is beauty plus -ful, written in Middle English as bewteful. It pushed aside the older native word for the same idea, Old English faeger, which survives as fair — a fair maiden was a beautiful one, though fair now points to light hair or to justice instead.
Middle English
bewteful
English, today
beautiful
Built from
From Middle English bewteful, from und + beaute. From Middle English bewteful, beautefull (“attractive to the eye, beautiful”), equivalent to beauty + ful. In this sense, largely displaced Old English fæġer (whence fair).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA