What is "nice"

Nice \Nice\ (n[imac]s), a. [Compar. Nicer (n[imac]"s[~e]r); superl. Nicest.] [OE., foolish, fr. OF. nice ignorant, fool, fr. L. nescius ignorant; ne not + scius knowing, scire to know. Perhaps influenced by E. nesh delicate, soft. See No, and Science.]

1. Foolish; silly; simple; ignorant; also, weak; effeminate. [Obs.]
   --Gower.

   But say that we ben wise and nothing nice.
   --Chaucer.

2. Of trifling moment; unimportant; trivial. [Obs.]

   The letter was not nice, but full of charge Of dear import.
   --Shak.

3. Overscrupulous or exacting; hard to please or satisfy; fastidious in small matters.

   Curious not knowing, not exact but nice.
   --Pope.

   And to taste Think not I shall be nice.
   --Milton.

4. Delicate; refined; dainty; pure.

   Dear love, continue nice and chaste.
   --Donne.

   A nice and subtile happiness.
   --Milton.

5. Apprehending slight differences or delicate distinctions; distinguishing accurately or minutely; carefully discriminating; as, a nice taste or judgment. ``Our author happy in a judge so nice.''
   --Pope. ``Nice verbal criticism.''
   --Coleridge.

6. Done or made with careful labor; suited to excite admiration on account of exactness; evidencing great skill; exact; fine; finished; as, nice proportions, nice workmanship, a nice application; exactly or fastidiously discriminated; requiring close discrimination; as, a nice point of law, a nice distinction in philosophy.

   The difference is too nice Where ends the virtue, or begins the vice.
   --Pope.

7. Pleasing; agreeable; gratifying; delightful; good; as, a nice party; a nice excursion; a nice day; a nice sauce, etc. [Loosely & Colloquially]

8. Pleasant; kind; as, a nice person.

9. Hence: Well-mannered; well-behaved; as, nice children.

   He's making a list, checking it twice. Gonna find out who's naughty or nice Santa Claus is coming to town.
   --Song.

   To make nice of, to be scrupulous about. [Obs.]
   --Shak.

   Syn: Dainty; delicate; exquisite; fine; accurate; exact; correct; precise; particular; pleasant; kind; scrupulous; punctilious; fastidious; squeamish; finical; effeminate; silly; well-mannered; well-behaved.

late 13c., "foolish, stupid, senseless," from Old French nice (12c.) "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish," from Latin nescius "ignorant, unaware," literally "not-knowing," from ne- "not" (see un-) + stem of scire "to know" (see science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj." [Weekley] -- from "timid" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c.1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).\n\nIn many examples from the 16th and 17th centuries it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken.

[OED]

Etymology 1

1. 1 (context obsolete English) silly, ignorant; foolish. (14th-17th c.) 2 (context now rare English) particular in one's conduct; scrupulous, painstaking; choosy. (from 14th c.) 3 (context obsolete English) particular as regards rules or qualities; strict. (16th-19th c.) 4 show or require great precision or sensitive discernment; subtle. (from 16th c.) 5 (context obsolete English) doubtful, as to the outcome; risky. (16th-19th c.) 6 respectable; virtuous. (from 18th c.) 7 pleasant, satisfactory. (from 18th c.) 8 Of a person: friendly, attractive. (from 18th c.) 9 With "and", having intensive effect: extremely. (from 18th c.) adv. (context colloquial English) nicely. interj. 1 Used to signify a job well done. 2 Used to signify approval. Etymology 2

   v

2. (context transitive computing Unix English) To run a process with a specified (usually lower) priority.

1. adj. pleasant or pleasing or agreeable in nature or appearance; "what a nice fellow you are and we all thought you so nasty"- George Meredith; "nice manners"; "a nice dress"; "a nice face"; "a nice day"; "had a nice time at the party"; "the corn and tomatoes are nice today" [ant: nasty]

2. socially or conventionally correct; refined or virtuous; "from a decent family"; "a nice girl" [syn: decent]

3. done with delicacy and skill; "a nice bit of craft"; "a job requiring nice measurements with a micrometer"; "a nice shot" [syn: skillful]

4. excessively fastidious and easily disgusted; "too nice about his food to take to camp cooking"; "so squeamish he would only touch the toilet handle with his elbow" [syn: dainty, overnice, prissy, squeamish]

5. noting distinctions with nicety; "a discriminating interior designer"; "a nice sense of color"; "a nice point in the argument" [syn: discriminate]

6. exhibiting courtesy and politeness; "a nice gesture" [syn: courteous, gracious]

Nice is a city located in the south of France.

Nice may also refer to:

'''nice''' is a program found on Unix and Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. It directly maps to a kernel call of the same name. nice is used to invoke a utility or shell script with a particular priority, thus giving the process more or less CPU time than other processes. A niceness of −20 is the highest priority and 19 is the lowest priority. The default niceness for processes is inherited from its parent process and is usually 0.

"Nice" is the 34th single by British pop band Duran Duran. Released in 2005 to radio in Europe and as download only, it was the third single to be lifted from the group's Astronaut album.

Nice is the seventh and final full-length studio album by the American rock band Rollins Band, released in 2001. It is their first album released on Sanctuary Records. The band line-up was Henry Rollins fronting the blues rock band Mother Superior, whilst retaining the Rollins Band name.

The track "What's the Matter Man" appears in the video game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3.

Nice (, ; Niçard , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; ; ; ) is the fifth most populous city in France and the capital of the Alpes Maritimes département. The urban area of Nice extends beyond the administrative city limits, with a population of about 1 million on an area of . Located in the Côte d'Azur area on the south east coast of France on the Mediterranean Sea, Nice is the second-largest French city on the Mediterranean coast and the second-largest city in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region after Marseille. Nice is about 13 kilometres (8 miles) from the principality of Monaco, and its airport is a gateway to the principality as well.

The city is nicknamed Nice la Belle ( Nissa La Bella in Niçard), which means Nice the Beautiful, which is also the title of the unofficial anthem of Nice, written by Menica Rondelly in 1912.

The area of today's Nice contains Terra Amata, an archaeological site which displays evidence of a very early use of fire. Around 350 BC, Greeks of Marseille founded a permanent settlement and called it Nikaia, after Nike, the goddess of victory. Through the ages, the town has changed hands many times. Its strategic location and port significantly contributed to its maritime strength. For centuries it was a dominion of Savoy, and was then part of France between 1792 and 1815, when it was returned to Piedmont-Sardinia until its re-annexation by France in 1860.

The natural beauty of the Nice area and its mild Mediterranean climate came to the attention of the English upper classes in the second half of the 18th century, when an increasing number of aristocratic families took to spending their winters there. The city's main seaside promenade, the Promenade des Anglais ("Walkway of the English') owes its name to visitors to the resort. For decades now, the picturesque Nicean surroundings have attracted not only those in search of relaxation, but also those seeking inspiration. The clear air and soft light have particularly appealed to some of Western culture's most outstanding painters, such as Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Niki de Saint Phalle and Arman. Their work is commemorated in many of the city's museums, including Musée Marc Chagall, Musée Matisse and Musée des Beaux-Arts. Nice has the second largest hotel capacity in the country and it is one of its most visited cities, receiving 4 million tourists every year. It also has the third busiest airport in France, after the two main Parisian ones. It is the historical capital city of the County of Nice (Comté de Nice).

Nice is an object-oriented programming language released under the GNU General Public License.

It features a powerful type system which can help eliminate many common bugs, such as null pointer dereferences and invalid casts, by detecting potential runtime errors at compile-time; the goal of the designers was to provide safety features comparable to those found in languages such as ML and Haskell, but using a more conventional syntax.

Nice aims to be feature-rich, and as such, in addition to the common features of modern object-oriented programming languages, it implements contracts in the style of Eiffel, class extensibility through multimethods, and many concepts drawn from functional programming such as anonymous functions, tuples, pattern matching (“value dispatch”), and parametric polymorphism.

Source programs are compiled to Java bytecode, and can therefore interact with libraries written in Java and other programming languages targeting the Java Virtual Machine.

Work on the Nice language appears to have slowed since early 2006.

Nice was the third album by The Nice; it was titled Everything As Nice As Mother Makes It in the US after Immediate's distribution changed from Columbia to Capitol. Nice had been initially released in the US with a slightly longer version of Rondo 69 not available on the UK or on the Capitol distributed US versions. The first US version of Nice was briefly reissued in 1973 by Columbia Special Products.

Continuing The Nice's fusion of jazz, blues, and rock, this album consists of studio (1–4) and live (5–6) tracks, the latter having become firm favourites in the band's live performances.

The album reached number 3 in the UK Album charts.

Nice is a 1992 studio album by the Australian band of the same name.

The songs "Theme from Nice" and "Circuit Diagram" were featured in the 1990s Nickelodeon television series The Adventures of Pete & Pete.

Nice was an Australian indie rock band which formed in 1991. The band was fronted by Randall Lee formerly of The Cannanes and later of Ashtray Boy on vocals and guitar; Susannah Stewart-Lindsay, previously a member of the Adelaide-based band, Rewind on the Paranoid Side, on guitar; and Jo Packer on drums. Francesca Bussey, later a member of The Cannanes, was a member of Nice on bass guitar during the recording sessions for their first album, Nice (1992), but left during production and was credited only as a guest. Bussey was replaced on bass guitar by Mark King.

Allmusic's Nitsuh Abebe felt that Nice, which was issued by United States label, Feel Good All Over, showed that "Lee's dark jangle sounds absolutely stunning, and while the record's songwriting isn't as consistent as one might hope, the majority of it works incredibly well, with unconventional time signatures and progressions keeping things from falling into strummy banality". "Dear John", which was the lead track on Nice, was covered by the band Aden. The band's songs "Theme from Nice" and "Circuit Diagram" from their 1993 album, Apple Pie, were included in the popular 1990s Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Adebe described Apple Pie as "a step toward the more varied pop sound" of Lee's future work with Ashtray Boy.

Nice is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

• Geoffrey Nice (born 1945), British barrister and activist
• Harry Nice (1877–1941), governor of Maryland, USA
• Hellé Nice (1900–1984), name assumed by Mariette Hélène Delangle, a French racing driver
• Margaret Morse Nice (1883–1974), American ornithologist