Other forms: breezes, breezed
A breeze is a light wind, the kind you are glad of. Curtains lifting at an open window, washing moving on the line, cool air coming off the sea in the late afternoon.
A breeze is gentle by definition; once it takes your hat off it has become a wind. You will meet a light breeze, a sea breeze, a stiff breeze at the strong end of what the word will carry. In informal English a breeze is anything easy — the second exam was a breeze — and to breeze through something is to finish it without effort. To breeze in is to arrive relaxed and slightly annoying, as though nobody had been waiting. Two people shooting the breeze are chatting about nothing in particular.
1nounbreezeA light, gentle wind.
“A breeze came off the water and cooled the whole terrace.”
2nouneasySomething very easy to do.
“After the first exam, the second one was a breeze.”
3verbmoveTo move somewhere in a confident, unhurried way.
“He breezed into the meeting twenty minutes late.”
breeze is a light wind.
Breeze surfaces first as a sailors' word, brise or brize, with Middle English brees meaning wind. Where it came from is genuinely unsettled: it appears in English, Catalan brisa and Italian brezza in the fifteenth century, with Spanish and Portuguese close behind, while the Dutch and French forms are attested later than the English one. The trail runs cold somewhere out at sea.
Middle English
brees — wind
English, today
breeze
Built from
From the earlier (nautical) term brise, brize (“breeze”), from Middle English brees (“wind”). Ultimate origin unknown. Variously supposed to derive from a gem - source like stq Briese (“breeze”), West Frisian brys (“a cool wind”), Dutch bries (“breeze”), early Dutch brysen (“to blow cool and fresh”), or from Spanish brisa (“northeast wind”). The earliest attestations are in Middle English brees (1460), Catalan brisa, and Italian brezza (all in 15th century), with Spanish (1504) and Portuguese briza (16th century) following closely after. The aforementioned Dutch cognates and French brise, however, are attested later than the term in English. The only internal hypothesis for any of those languages is a modification of Old Occitan bisa (“strong wind”), which is not widely accepted.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA