Curious means wanting very much to find out. The question you ask because you cannot help it.
It takes about: curious about the neighbours, curious about how it works. The word is a compliment when applied to a mind, since intellectual curiosity is what makes people learn anything at all. There is a second and quite separate sense meaning strange, as in a curious smell or the curious fact that nobody noticed, and English keeps them apart by context alone. The adverb curiously usually introduces something odd.
1adjectivecuriousEager to know or learn something.~33%
“He was curious about what was in the box.”
2adjectivestrangeStrange or unusual.~67%
“There was a curious silence in the hall.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷeys-
Latin
cūriōsus
Old French
curius
Middle English
curious
English, today
curious
From Middle English curious, from Old French curius, from Latin cūriōsus. The English word is cognate with Italian curioso, Occitan curios, Portuguese curioso, and Spanish curioso. Displaced native Old English firwitġeorn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA