Word.ws English Dictionary

nice as ninepence

nice as ninepence adjective: perfectly all right; fine.

Adjective

nice as ninepence (not comparable)

  1. (simile) Perfectly all right; fine.
    • She had been mistress of the farm so long that it would be hard for her to play second fiddle, but give her time and she'd be as good as new butter and as nice as ninepence, he said.1913, Ethel Carnie, Miss Nobody, page 68
  2. (simile) Neat, tidy, in order.

Origin of nice as ninepence

Corruption of nice as ninepins, from the neat and precise ordering of the skittles in the game of ninepins.

Questions about nice as ninepence

What does nice as ninepence mean?
Nice as ninepence means perfectly all right; fine.
What part of speech is nice as ninepence?
Nice as ninepence is an adjective.

Words near nice as ninepence in the dictionary

  1. niccolites
  2. Niccum
  3. Niccums
  4. nice
  5. nice and
  6. nice as ninepence
  7. nice as pie
  8. nice cream
  9. nice creams
  10. nice going
  11. nice guy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nice as ninepence (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: En-au-nice as ninepence.ogg.

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