Wholesome means good for you in a plain, honest way. Brown bread and soup, a long walk before lunch, a film your grandmother and your nephew could watch in the same room.
It works on the body and on the morals at once. Food that is wholesome is nourishing and simple — not a supplement or a protein shake, but real food that does you good. Behaviour and entertainment that are wholesome are clean and harmless: wholesome fun, wholesome family television. Online the word has taken on a life of its own, where a wholesome post is one that leaves you warmer than it found you, and people say it about photographs of dogs. The opposite, unwholesome, sounds faintly sinister, which shows how much approval the word itself carries.
1adjectivenourishingGood for your health; nourishing.
“They lived on plain, wholesome food from their own garden.”
synonyms: nourishing, healthy
2adjectivemorallyMorally good and harmless.
“The show is wholesome enough for a Sunday afternoon.”
3adjectivewholesomeWarm and heartening in a gentle way.
“The whole exchange in the comments was unexpectedly wholesome.”
Wholesome was holesome before the silent w came across from the spelling of whole, and further back it was Old English hālsum — hale plus -some, the ending that means 'giving' or 'tending towards'. Hale and whole both meant healthy and unbroken, so wholesome is health-giving, said of a loaf or of a life. German heilsam and Swedish hälsosam are built from the same two pieces.
Proto-Germanic
*hailasamaz
Proto-West Germanic
*hailasam
Old English
*hālsum
Middle English
holsom
English, today
wholesome
From earlier holesome, from Middle English holsom, holsum, helsum, halsum, from Old English hālsum, hǣlsum, from Proto-West Germanic hailasam, from Proto-Germanic hailasamaz, equivalent to whole + some or hale + some. Cognate with stq heelsoam, Dutch heilzaam, German Low German heelsaam, German heilsam, Icelandic heilsamur, Norwegian Nynorsk helsesam, Swedish hälsosam (“wholesome”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA