Wonderful means so good that it makes you happy just to think about it. A wonderful meal, a wonderful holiday, a wonderful old teacher everybody still remembers.
It is a warm word rather than a precise one: it says how something made you feel, not what it was like. You use it about people as easily as about things — 'she has been wonderful since my mother died.' The adverb is wonderfully, and it strengthens whatever comes after it: wonderfully calm, wonderfully rude. Said flatly after bad news, 'Oh, wonderful' flips into sarcasm, and English speakers do this constantly. The word is built from wonder + -ful, but nobody hears wonder in it any more; wonderful simply means excellent.
1adjectivewonderfulExtremely good; giving great pleasure.
“We had a wonderful time in Lisbon.”
synonyms: marvellous, fantastic, superb
2adjectiveremarkableSo remarkable that it fills you with amazement.
“The human eye is a wonderful piece of engineering.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: amazing, fantastic, great
Wonderful is Old English wundorful — wonder plus -ful, so 'full of wonder', the sort of thing that stops you where you stand and makes you stare. German wundervoll and Dutch wondervol are built out of the same two pieces. The staring has faded: a wonderful sandwich is not astonishing, only very good.
Proto-West Germanic
*wundrafull
Old English
wundorful — wonderful
Middle English
wonderful
English, today
wonderful
From Middle English wonderful, wondirful, from Old English wundorful (“wonderful”), from Proto-West Germanic wundrafull, equivalent to wonder + -ful. Cognate Dutch wondervol (“wonderful”), German wundervoll (“wonderful”). Compare Old English wuldorfull (“glorious”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA