Word.ws English Dictionary

nesh

/nɛʃ/

nesh adjective: soft; tender; sensitive; yielding.

Adjective

nesh (comparative nesher, superlative neshest)

  1. (UK, dialectal) Soft; tender; sensitive; yielding.
    • haue ye no merueylle sayd the good man therof / for hit semeth wel god loueth yow / for men maye vnderstande a stone is hard of kynde /[…]/ for thou wylt not leue thy synne for no goodnes that god hath sente the / therfor thou arte more than ony stone / and neuer woldest thow be maade neysshe nor...1485, Sir Thomas Malory, chapter XX, in Le Morte Darthur, book XIII
  2. (UK, dialectal) Delicate; weak; poor-spirited; susceptible to cold weather, harsh conditions etc.
    • And if he keeps the daughter so long at boarding-school, he'll make her as nesh as her mother was.1886 May – 1887 April, Thomas Hardy, “Chapter 4”, in The Woodlanders […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
    • No, tha'd drop down stiff, as dead as a door-knob, wi' thy nesh sides.1913, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter 8, in Sons and Lovers, London: Duckworth & Co. […], →OCLC
  3. (UK, dialectal) Soft; friable; crumbly.

Verb

nesh (third-person singular simple present neshes, present participle neshing, simple past and past participle neshed)

  1. (transitive) To make soft, tender, or weak.
  2. (Northern England, dialectal, intransitive) To act timidly.

nesh meaning in Urdu

nesh in Urdu

ملائم, نرم

Forms of nesh

Adjective
comparativenesher
superlativeneshest
alternative English Newfoundlandnish
Verb
third-person singular presentneshes
present participleneshing
past participleneshed
pastneshed

Origin of nesh

From Middle English nesh, nesch, nesche, from Old English hnesċe, hnysċe, næsċe (“soft, tender, mild; weak, delicate; slack, negligent; effeminate, wanton”), from Proto-West Germanic *hnaskwī, from Proto-Germanic *hnaskuz (“soft, tender”), from Proto-Indo-European *knēs-, *kenes- (“to scratch, scrape, rub”). Cognate with Scots nesch, nesh (“soft, tender, yielding easily to pressure, sensitive”), Dutch nesch, nes (“wet, moist”), Gothic 𐌷𐌽𐌰𐍃𐌵𐌿𐍃 (hnasqus, “soft, tender, delicate”). Compare also nask, nasky, nasty.

From Middle English neschen, from Old English hnesċan, hnesċian (“to make soft, soften; become soft, give way, waver”), from Proto-West Germanic *hnaskwōn (“to make soft”), from Proto-Indo-European *knēs-, *kenes- (“to scratch, scrape, rub”). Cognate with Old High German nascōn ("to nibble at, parasitise, squander"; > German naschen (“to nibble, pinch”)). Doublet of nosh.

Words formed from nesh

Words that rhyme with nesh

21 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about nesh

What does nesh mean?
Nesh means soft; tender; sensitive; yielding.
What is nesh in Urdu?
Nesh in Urdu is ملائم, نرم. See Nesh meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is nesh?
Nesh can be an adjective or a verb.
How do you pronounce nesh?
Nesh is pronounced /nɛʃ/.

Words near nesh in the dictionary

  1. Nesean
  2. Nesebar
  3. NESes
  4. nesfatin-1
  5. Nesfield
  6. nesh
  7. neshama
  8. neshamah
  9. neshamahs
  10. neshamas
  11. Neshanic Station

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nesh (page history and authors); nesh (Urdu Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-nesh.wav.

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