Other forms: contents, contented
Content means quietly happy with what you have — not thrilled, not celebrating, just settled where you are. A dog asleep in a patch of sun. Your grandfather in the same chair with the same crossword, perfectly content.
That is the adjective, and the stress falls on the second half: con-TENT. Move the stress to the front and CON-tent is a different word with the same spelling — the stuff inside something, the contents of a drawer, the content of a speech, and now everything anybody puts online. Content works as a verb too: he had to content himself with second place. Two patterns are worth learning side by side — content with is about what you already have, content to is about what you will put up with: content with the small flat, content to wait another year.
1adjectivecontentQuietly satisfied with what you have and how things are.~2%
“She is content in the new house.”
synonyms: satisfied, at ease
2nounvideoWhat is inside something, or what a piece of writing, speech or video is about.~94%
“The content of the letter was never made public.”
3nounheldThe things held inside a container — in this sense always plural, the contents.~2%
“He tipped the contents of the bag onto the table.”
4verbyourselfTo make yourself satisfied with less than you wanted.~2%
“We had to content ourselves with a photograph of the mountain.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
con-TENT → a TENT
You sit outside your tent with a cup of tea, watching the rain come down on the field. Everything you own is in the tent behind you, and it is enough.
hooks ontotent
Latin contentus meant contained and satisfied at once, because it is the past participle of continēre, to contain. To be content is to be held inside your own edges and to want nothing past them — and it is the very same word as the contents of a box, which are what the box holds.
Latin
contentus#Etymology_2 — contained; satisfied
Middle English
contenten — to satisfy
English, today
content
Built from
From Middle English contenten (“to satisfy”), from Latin contentus#Etymology_2 (“contained; satisfied”), past participle of continēre (“to contain”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA