delight
noun · verb
Simple meaning
Something that gives great joy or pleasure.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dihlytSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
dɪˈlaɪt
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Something that gives great joy or pleasure.
verb
To give delight to; to affect with great pleasure; to please highly.
Give pleasure to or be pleasing to
intransitive
To have or take great pleasure.
Take delight in
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Something that gives great joy or pleasure.
Used this way, delight is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly warm, approving pull. It lands hard, so it overstates anything mild. It turns up most in personal or emotional discussion and literature or storytelling contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Positive
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Very strong
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Warm and admiring
- Usage feel
- Everyday but emotionally strong
Where it naturally appears
- Personal/emotional discussion
- Literature/storytelling
Usage note
Delight is emotionally heavy: it suggests deep or lasting feeling, not a passing mood, so it can overstate a small reaction.
Nearby words
- delectation , rarer, so it draws attention
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use delight
- “His delight to see her was obvious to all.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
An old cottage garden plant of southeastern Europe widely cultivated for its attractive white woolly foliage and showy crimson flowers.
A jellied candy typically flavored with rose water.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.