Word.ws English Dictionary

archaïc

archaïc is the archaic spelling of archaic.

Meaning of archaic

Adjective

archaic (comparative more archaic, superlative most archaic)

  1. Of or characterized by antiquity; old-fashioned, quaint, antiquated.
    • A person familiar with the dialect of certain portions of Massachusetts will not fail to recognize, in ordinary discourse, many words now noted in English vocabularies as archaic, the greater part of which were in common use about the time of the King James translation of the Bible. Shakespeare...1848, James Russel Lowell, The Biglow Papers
  2. No longer in ordinary use, though still used occasionally to give a sense of antiquity and still likely to be understood by well-educated speakers and are found in historical texts.
    • The language of the Faerie Queene was made archaic Language:— in order to be in keeping with the chivalry of bygone ages that formed its subject.1893, Harrington Hugh Melville Percival, “Introduction”, in The faerie queene: Book 1, page lxi
  3. Belonging to the archaic period.

See all 5 meanings of archaic

Forms of archaïc

comparativemore archaïc
superlativemost archaïc

Questions about archaïc

What is archaïc the archaic spelling of?
Archaïc is the archaic spelling of archaic.

Words near archaïc in the dictionary

  1. archaral
  2. archasterid
  3. archasterids
  4. archazolid
  5. archazolids
  6. archaïc
  7. archbasilica
  8. archbasilicas
  9. archbish
  10. archbishes
  11. archbishop

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: archaïc (page history and authors); archaic (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.

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Cite this entry: “archaïc.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/archa%C3%AFc. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.