Word.ws English Dictionary

Alice

/ˈæl.ɪs/

Alice proper noun: a female given name from the Germanic languages popular in England since the Middle Ages.

Proper noun

Alice

  1. A female given name from the Germanic languages popular in England since the Middle Ages.
    • "My name is Alice, but—"
      "It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"
      "Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.
      "Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh, "my name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too....1871, Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter 6
    • She was heavenly to look at, and graceful, both in and out of water. She was a sculptress. She was christened 'Alice', but she used to deny that she was really an Alice. I agreed. Everybody agreed. Sometime in a dream maybe I will find out what her real name was.1968, Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House, Delacorte Press, page xiv
  2. The person or system that sends a message to another person or system conventionally known as Bob.
    • Alice sends the message, "I am Alice," to Bob. Bob chooses a nonce, N and sends it to Alice. Alice encrypts the nonce using Alice and Bob's symmetric secret key, K#95;#123;A-B#125;, and sends the encrypted nonce, K#95;#123;A-B#125;(N) back to Bob.1978, V.S. Bagad, I.A. Dhotre, Computer Networks, Technical Publications, →ISBN
    • Alice opens her lantern, Bob opens his the instant he sees Alice's, and Alice notes the time T that passes between the moment she opens hers and the moment she sees the light returning to her from Bob's.2009, N. David Mermin, It's About Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 19
    Synonyms:
    Party A
  3. (Australia, often, slang, with-definite-article) The city of Alice Springs, Australia.
    • At that point in my second visit to the Alice, I'd been there only a day.[…] they're doing Australia in two weeks, with a few days each for Sydney, the Alice and the Rock, Kakadu and Cairns.2002, Sylvia Lawson, “Budgerigars, and Positions of Ignorance”, in How Simone de Beauvoir died in Australia: stories and essays, page 17
    • In 1892 my Chinese grandfather lived in Alice.2003, Janet Judy McIntyre-Mills, quoting Olive Veverbrants, Critical systemic praxis for social and environmental justice, page 27
  4. A locality in the Clarence Valley council area, north eastern New South Wales, Australia.
  5. A city in North Dakota.
  6. A city, the county seat of Jim Wells County, Texas.

Noun capitalized: ALICE

ALICE (uncountable)

  1. (US, abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of All-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment.
  2. (abbreviation, acronym, artificial intelligence) Acronym of Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity.
    • After ALICE was introduced on Pandorabots’s platform in the early 2000s, one of its interlocutors was the film director Spike Jonze. He would later cite their conversation as the inspiration for his movie “Her,” which follows a lonely man as he falls in love with his artificial intelligence...2025 November 17, Lauren Kunze, “The Sad and Dangerous Reality Behind ‘Her’”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

Alice meaning in Arabic

Alice in Arabic

female given name
أَلِيس ʔalīs

Examples of Alice in a sentence

  • Party leader Alice Weidel has already hailed the coalition’s collapse as a “liberation” for Germany.2024 November 7, Sophie Tanno, Sebastian Shukla and Olesya Dmitracova, “Germany’s normally stable government has collapsed. Here’s why”, in...
  • "Don't waste yer time in The Alice, get out and see the country — that's what yer 'ere for."2004, Larry Habegger, Travelers' Tales Australia: True Stories, page 7:

Synonyms of Alice

Origin of Alice

From Middle English Alice, from Old French Alys, Alice, from Old High German Adalheid, proposed to derive from Proto-Germanic *aþalaz (“noble”) + *haiduz (“character”). Doublet of Adelaide.

Words formed from Alice

Phrases with Alice

Words that rhyme with Alice

Questions about Alice

What does Alice mean?
Alice means a female given name from the Germanic languages popular in England since the Middle Ages.
What is Alice in Arabic?
Alice in Arabic is أَلِيس (ʔalīs). See Alice meaning in Arabic.
How do you use Alice in a sentence?
Party leader Alice Weidel has already hailed the coalition’s collapse as a “liberation” for Germany.
What part of speech is Alice?
Alice can be a proper noun or a noun.
How do you pronounce Alice?
Alice is pronounced /ˈæl.ɪs/.

Words near Alice in the dictionary

  1. Alic
  2. alicaforsen
  3. alicant
  4. Alicante
  5. alicants
  6. Alice
  7. Alice B. Toklas brownie
  8. Alice B. Toklas brownies
  9. Alice band
  10. Alice bands
  11. Alice blue

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Alice (page history and authors); ALICE (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-Alice.ogg, EN-AU ck1 Alice.ogg.

Cite this entry: “Alice.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/alice. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.