Word.ws English Dictionary

best-known

best-known is the superlative form of well-known.

Meaning of well-known

Adjective

well-known (comparative better-known or more well-known, superlative best-known or most well-known)

  1. Familiar, famous, renowned, noted or widely known.
    • Edward Churchill still attended to his work in a hopeless mechanical manner like a sleep-walker who walks safely on a well-known round. But his Roman collar galled him, his cossack stifled him, his biretta was as uncomfortable as a merry-andrew's cap and bells.1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XV, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    noted, twice-told
    Antonyms:
    little-known
  2. (not comparable) Generally recognized; reserved for some usual purpose.
    • We would like to catalog other sockets which are supposed to be well-known1972, Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, RFC 322 - Well known socket numbers

Questions about best-known

What is best-known the superlative form of?
Best-known is the superlative form of well-known.

Words near best-known in the dictionary

  1. best-informed
  2. best-intentioned
  3. best-kempt
  4. best-kept secret
  5. best-kept secrets
  6. best-known
  7. best-learned
  8. best-lit
  9. best-looking
  10. best-loved
  11. best-mannered

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: best-known (page history and authors); well-known (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: “best-known.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/best-known. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.