wonderful

adj
/ˈwʌn.də.fl̩/UK/ˈwʌn.dɚ.fl̩/CA/ˈwan.də.fl̩/

Etymology

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”).

  1. inherited from *wundrafull
  2. inherited from wundorful — “wonderful
  3. inherited from wonderful

Definitions

  1. Tending to excite wonder

    Tending to excite wonder; surprising, extraordinary.

    • His delusion was not wonderful, but most natural.
    • It is not wonderful that Mrs Smith declined to visit the beer garden, in view of her militant temperance. [=It is no wonder that she declined.]
    • 'Ha!' cried Dangerfield, with a sort of gasp, and a violent smirk, the joyousness of which was, however, counteracted by a lurid scowl and a wonderful livid glare in his wild eyes; […]
  2. Surprisingly excellent

    Surprisingly excellent; very good or admirable, extremely impressive.

    • They served a wonderful six-course meal.
    • What appears to be wonderful may turn out to be anything but.
  3. Exceedingly, to a great extent.

    • […] wherein they were no sooner entered, but they saw that it was wonderful dark, and it seemed unto them that it should be a very large hall, and there they heard very fearful howlings, as though there had been a legion of hell-hounds […]
    • It was wonderful stormy weather that night, and it so befell that there was sailing by the Jutland coast a little north of the east mouth of the Limfirth a man of Iceland bound south […]

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at wonderful. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01wonderful02excite03stir04emotionally05emotional06strong07great

A definitional loop anchored at wonderful. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

7 hops · closes at wonderful

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA