Neat means everything is clean and exactly where it belongs. A neat desk with the pens standing in a pot, a neat pile of folded towels, a bed with the sheet pulled tight and the corners tucked under.
Neat is about order rather than dirt: a room can be spotless and still be a mess, and a shed can be filthy and perfectly neat. Handwriting is neat when the letters are even and easy to read. A neat solution is the clever one that does the job with nothing wasted — one line instead of twenty. Whisky served neat has nothing added: no ice, no water, no mixer. Americans also say neat to mean simply very good, though that use sounds a little old now, like something a teenager said in 1985. The pairing you hear most is neat and tidy.
1adjectiveneatClean and arranged with everything in its proper place.
“He kept the tools on the shelf in a neat row, largest to smallest.”
2adjectivesmallEven, small and easy to read, said of handwriting or lettering.
“Her notes are in a neat hand, every letter the same height.”
3adjectiveelegantDone with skill and no waste; clever and economical.
“It was a neat solution: one wire, moved six inches.”
4adjectiveservedServed with nothing added — no ice, no water, no mixer.
“He drinks his whisky neat and always has.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: tidy, orderly
Neat traces back to Latin nitidus, "gleaming", from niteo, "to shine". Old French turned it into net, "clean, clear, pure", and Anglo-Norman neit meant "good, desirable, clean" before Middle English took it in as nete. So the oldest idea in the word is not order but shine — the gleam of a surface with nothing left on it. English net, as in a net profit with everything else stripped away, is the very same word arriving by a different door.
Latin
nitidus — gleaming
Old French
net
Anglo-Norman
neit — good, desirable, clean
Middle English
nete
English, today
neat
Built from
From Middle English nete, net, nette, from Anglo-Norman neit (“good, desirable, clean”), a variant of Old French net, nette (“clean, clear, pure”), from Latin nitidus (“gleaming”), derived from niteo (“to shine”). a doublet of net and nitid. Cognate with German nett (“nice, kind”). Compare also nait.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA