Other forms: softer, softest
Soft means easy to press and gentle to touch — a soft pillow, soft ground, soft hair. It is the opposite of hard and, for materials, of rough.
It stretches widely. A soft voice is quiet, a soft light is not harsh, soft colours are pale, a soft heart is kind, and being soft on somebody means not strict enough with them. In water, soft means low in minerals; in drinks, a soft drink has no alcohol; and in linguistics a soft c or g is the s or j sound. Note soften, the verb, where the t is silent, and softly, the adverb.
1adjectivesoftEasy to press, and gentle to touch.
“The ground was too soft to walk on.”
synonyms: yielding, squashy
2adjectivequietQuiet, or not harsh.
“She said it in a soft voice.”
3adjectivestrictNot strict enough.
“The report says the regulator has been too soft.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
soft is a quality of texture or gentleness.
Old English softe meant gentle or agreeable before it meant yielding to pressure. The physical sense grew out of the social one rather than the reverse, which is why soft words and a soft cushion are both natural in English.
Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
Middle English
softe
English, today
soft
Built from
From Middle English softe. From Middle English softe, from Old English sōfte, alteration of earlier sēfte (“soft”), from Proto-West Germanic samft(ī) (“level, even, smooth, soft, gentle”) (compare sōmiz (“agreeable, fitting”)), from Proto-Indo-European semptio-, semtio-, from sem- (“one, whole”). Cognate with West Frisian sêft (“gentle; soft”), Dutch zacht (“soft”), German Low German sacht (“soft”), German sanft (“soft, yielding”), Old Norse sœmr (“agreeable, fitting”), samr (“same”). More at seem, same.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA