Other forms: finer, finest, fines, fined, fining
Fine means nothing is wrong. How are you? Fine. How is the new flat? Fine. It is the answer you give at the door with your coat half off, and it closes the subject.
Said flat, after an argument, it means the opposite of what it says — Fine. with a full stop on it is a warning, not an agreement. Fine also means thin or in tiny pieces: fine hair, fine sand, the fine print at the bottom of a contract that nobody reads. It means excellent as well: a fine wine, a fine day, a fine performance. And then there is the other fine altogether, the money you pay for breaking a rule — a parking fine, a library fine — with a verb to match, so a club can be fined for turning up late.
1adjectiveokAll right; good enough; neither ill nor unhappy.~53%
“The car is old, but the engine is fine.”
synonyms: all right, acceptable
2nounmoneyMoney you must pay as a punishment for breaking a rule.~33%
“He got a fine for parking on the grass.”
3adjectivethinVery thin, or made of very small pieces; delicate.~12%
“Fine sand blew in under the door.”
4verbpayTo make someone pay money as a punishment.~2%
“The club was fined for starting late.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 86 of them on a sense (54 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: penalty
The money is the clear one: Medieval Latin fīnis, a payment in settlement or tax, came through Old French into English as a fine. Hand it over and the matter is settled. The adjective is murkier — of obscure origin, the record says, probably the same fīnis, a boundary, a limit, an end, or else fīniō, to finish. It arrived by way of Old French fin, meaning fine, minute and exact, which is the fine of fine sand and fine wine.
Latin
fīniō — to finish
Old French
fin — fine, minute, exact
Middle English
fin
English, today
fine
Built from
From Middle English fin, fyn, from Old French fin (“fine, minute, exact”), of obscure origin, but probably derived from Latin fīniō (“to finish”) or fīnis (“boundary, limit, end”), with an abstract sense of fine or thin also arising in many Romance languages (compare Italian, Portuguese and Spanish fino). a doublet of fino.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA