Other forms: ideals
Ideal means the best you could possibly imagine for a purpose. An ideal candidate, ideal conditions, not ideal.
Not ideal is British understatement for anything from inconvenient to catastrophic. As a noun, an ideal is a standard or principle worth aiming at: political ideals, live up to your ideals. In an ideal world means acknowledging that this is not one. Note idealistic, meaning guided by ideals and slightly impractical; idealise, meaning to imagine something better than it is; and that ideal is not usually compared — more ideal is disliked.
1adjectiveidealThe best possible for a purpose.
“Conditions were ideal for about two hours.”
synonyms: perfect, optimal
2nounstandardA standard or principle worth aiming at.
“The ideals survived about as long as the first budget.”
ideal is a standard of perfection.
Also accepted in games: perfect
Latin idealis means existing in idea, from Greek idea, a form or pattern — Plato's word for the perfect form of which everything real is a copy. The word carries its philosophy inside it.
Latin
ideālis — existing in idea
French
idéal
English, today
ideal
From French idéal, from Latin ideālis (“existing in idea”), by surface analysis, idea + -al, from Latin idea (“idea”); see idea. In mathematics, the noun ring theory sense was first introduced by German mathematician Richard Dedekind in his 1871 edition of a text on number theory. The concept was quickly expanded to ring theory and later generalised to order theory. The set theory and Lie theory senses can be regarded as applications of the order theory sense.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA