playful

UK/ˈpleɪfl̩/US/ˈpleɪfl̩/

adjectiveB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,848 of 15,258neutral

Playful means full of fun and lightness. Not serious, and not meaning any harm by it.

It describes people, animals and tone equally, so a playful kitten, a playful remark and a playful design are all standard. What the word guarantees is the absence of malice, which is why a playful insult is safe and the same words said flatly are not. The adverb playfully often accompanies a verb like nudged or teased. Its neighbours are mischievous, which carries slightly more risk, and frivolous, which is a criticism.

Definitions of playful

1adjectiveplayfulLively and full of fun, with no serious intent.B2
“He gave her a playful shove.”

Where it comes from

Middle English
pleiful
English, today
playful

From Middle English pleiful, equivalent to play + ful.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building

First appears in chapter 12 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

playful in the wild

In western culture, it has come to be used to refer to softcore or playful sexuality, as distinct from the word hentai, which connotes perversion or fetishism.
Ecchi
In human interactions, teasing exists in three major forms: playful, hurtful, and educative.
Teasing
In the simplest contemporary sense, any literary work of a playful, mocking, joking, silly or frivolous nature may be called gesaku.
Gesaku
Founded by the art critic Hrag Vartanian and his husband Veken Gueyikian in October 2009, the site describes itself as a "forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking".
Hyperallergic

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

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