What kind of adjective is unique

Some are modified frequently: very heavy, extremely tall, mostly sunny, seriously flawed. These words have narrow applications and often name a quality that does not exist in degrees. They are rarely used in the comparative or superlative, but this is a consequence of logic, not of grammar. Needless to say, people confuse logic and grammar. Grammar is not logical. His list includes words like square, dead, entire, false , and obvious.

And yet, evidence of actual usage shows that almost square, nearly dead, whole entire, mostly false , and plainly obvious are all commonly used and standard. Which would make him very angry. Arthur Conan Doyle modified excellent in a way that stands out to modern ears twice in the Sherlock Holmes stories—both times in words spoken by the Great Detective himself:.

Very excellent is a good example of a plausible but uncommon way to modify an adjective. The ideal that these list makers wish to uphold has to do with the purest interpretation of the definition of a word. It does not break. Unique dates back to the 17th century but was little used until the end of the 18th when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was reacquired from French.

Todd entered it as a foreign word in his edition of Johnson's Dictionary, characterizing it as "affected and useless. With popular use came a broadening of application beyond the original two meanings here numbered senses 1 and 2a.

In modern use both comparison and modification are widespread and standard but are confined to the extended senses 2b and 3. When sense 1 or sense 2a is intended, unique is used without qualifying modifiers. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'unique. Send us feedback. French, from Latin unicus , from unus one — more at one.

See more words from the same year. Accessed 12 Nov. More Definitions for unique. Nglish: Translation of unique for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of unique for Arabic Speakers.

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Essential Meaning of unique. His talents make him truly unique. Humans are unique among mammals in several respects. Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing.

That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface!

So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project mentioned above , mongodb and express.