Other forms: rarer, rarest
Rare means you hardly ever come across it. A rare bird that people drive four hours and stand in a wet field to see. A rare 1p coin worth more than the car. A rare week of sunshine in April.
Rare covers scarce things and infrequent events alike: rare metals, a rare mistake, it is rare for him to be late. Point it at value and it means unusually fine rather than merely uncommon — a rare talent, a rare kindness. In a restaurant rare is how a steak is cooked, still red in the middle and one step from raw, with medium and well done above it. The adverb rarely means almost never, and it turns the sentence inside out when it comes first: rarely have I seen such a mess. The noun is rarity, which names both the quality and the object.
1adjectiverareNot found or not happening very much.~96%
“The plant is rare outside a few valleys in the north.”
synonyms: uncommon, scarce
2adjectiveexceptionalUnusually good or valuable.~2%
“She has a rare gift for making strangers feel at home.”
synonyms: exceptional, remarkable
3adjectivecookedCooked for a short time only, so that it is still red inside.~2%
“He orders his steak rare and everyone else looks away.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: uncommon
Rare came through Old French from Latin rārus, which meant loose, thin, spaced far apart: cloth with a wide weave, seeds scattered too thinly over a field. Infrequency is that same picture drawn in time instead of space, events spread so far apart that you hardly meet one. Rare pushed the older English words aside — geason vanished entirely, and seld survives only inside seldom.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁reh₁- — friable, thin
Latin
rārus — loose, spaced apart, thin, infrequent
Old French
rare
Middle English
rare
English, today
rare
Built from
From Middle English rare, from Old French rare, rere (“rare, uncommon”), from Latin rārus (“loose, spaced apart, thin, infrequent”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁reh₁- (“friable, thin”). Displaced native geason (“rare, scarce”) (from gesen, from gǣsne); and largely displaced seld (from selden) and seldscene (from seldsēne) hence modern seld
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA