Other forms: vintages
Vintage means old and good — old enough to be admired for it. A vintage coat from the fifties, a vintage car with the chrome polished, a vintage guitar that somebody's father bought new.
The word starts in the vineyard: a vintage is one year's grape harvest, and a vintage wine is made from the grapes of one named year instead of blended out of several. From wine it spread to everything else old and well made, which is why vintage flatters where old does not — a vintage dress is wanted, an old dress is just old. Keep it away from things that are merely secondhand or worn out, and away from antique, which reaches back much further: a vintage jacket is from the sixties, an antique chair is from 1780. There is one more use, and it is affectionate: vintage Hitchcock, vintage Dad, meaning somebody doing exactly the thing they are known for, at their best.
1adjectivevintageOld, and valued for its quality and its style.~73%
“She collects vintage cameras and actually uses them.”
2nounparticularThe wine of one particular year, or the grape harvest that made it.~17%
“The 1982 vintage is still talked about.”
3adjectivesingleOf wine, made from the grapes of a single named year.~8%
“A vintage port will keep for decades.”
4adjectiveshowingShowing someone at their most characteristic and their best.~2%
“That reply was vintage Churchill.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 128 sentences found in the wild and placed 94 of them on a sense (34 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: retro
Latin vindēmia was the gathering of the grapes: vīnum, wine, plus dēmō, to take away — itself de, away, on emō, to take. A vintage was the year's wine taken off the vines, and nothing more. English kept the year and let the grapes go, so a vintage coat is now simply a coat from a year worth naming.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁em-
Latin
vindēmia — a gathering of grapes, vintage
Old French
vendage
Anglo-Norman
vendenge
Middle English
vendage
English, today
vintage
Built from
From Middle English vendage, vyndage, from Anglo-Norman vendenge, from Old French vendage, vendenge (cognate with French vendange), from Latin vindēmia (“a gathering of grapes, vintage”), from vīnum (“wine”) + dēmō (“take off or away, remove”), from de (“of; from, away from”) + emō (“take”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA