Other forms: simpler, simplest
Simple means easy to understand or to do, or made of few parts. A simple question, a simple meal, a simple machine.
The trap is that simple can also mean plain to the point of bareness, and — of a person — slow-witted, which is an old and unkind use best avoided. Keep simple and simplistic apart: simplistic is always a criticism and means over-simplified, treating something complicated as if it were not. And note the useful pair simple and easy, which are not synonyms: a simple task has few steps, an easy task takes little effort, and a simple task can be extremely hard. In grammar, the simple tenses are the ones without an auxiliary.
1adjectivesimpleEasy to understand or to do.~36%
“It is a simple form and takes five minutes.”
synonyms: straightforward, easy, plain
2adjectivedecorationMade of few parts, or without decoration.~62%
“A simple wooden chair, and nothing else in the room.”
3adjectivenothingUsed to say there is nothing more to it.~2%
“The simple fact is that nobody checked.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
simple is a degree of ease.
Latin simplex meant single-fold — sim-, one, plus plicare, to fold, the same verb behind complicated, which is folded together, and duplicate, which is folded twice. Something simple has one fold in it; something complicated has many.
Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
Middle English
symple
English, today
simple
Built from
From Middle English symple. Middle English symple, from Old French simple, from Latin simplex (“simple”) literally “onefold” (as opposed to duplex (“double”) literally “twofold”), from semel (“the same”) + plicō (“to fold”). See same and fold. Compare single, singular, simultaneous, etc. Partially displaced native English onefold.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA