Other forms: happier, happiest
Happy means feeling good and pleased — the opposite of sad. A happy child, a happy day, I am happy for you.
It also means willing: I am happy to help, happy to wait, which is a very common polite formula and has little to do with joy. Happy with means satisfied: happy with the result. It appears in every greeting — Happy Birthday, Happy Christmas, Happy New Year. Note happily, which can mean fortunately as well as joyfully; happy medium, meaning a good compromise; and many happy returns.
1adjectivehappyFeeling good and pleased.
“She was happy there for about six years.”
2adjectiveadjectiveWilling to do something.
“I am happy to take it if nobody else wants to.”
3adjectivesatisfiedSatisfied with something.
“Nobody was happy with the wording.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
happy is a state of feeling.
Also accepted in games: glad
Middle English happy comes from hap, meaning luck or chance — the same hap inside happen, perhaps and mishap. Being happy originally meant being lucky, and the emotional sense grew out of the fortunate one.
Middle English
happy
English, today
happy
Built from
From Middle English happy. From Middle English happy (“fortunate, happy”), perhaps an alteration of Middle English happyn, happen (“fortunate, happy”), possibly related to or from Old Norse heppinn (“fortunate, happy”); and potentially assimilated to be equivalent to hap + -y. Compare also Icelandic heppinn (“lucky”), Faroese heppin (“fortunate, lucky, happy”), Norwegian Nynorsk heppen (“lucky”), Scots happin (“fortunate, blessed”). See further at hap.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA