Word.ws English Dictionary

nis

nis noun: a nix; a hobgoblin, especially one that resides in a farm house. Also the contraction of ne is.

Noun (1)

nis (plural nisses)

  1. A nix; a hobgoblin, especially one that resides in a farm house.
    • No farm-house goes on well without there is a Nis in it, and well is it for the maids and the men when they are in favour with him.1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 222
    • The people of the Feroes call the Nisses or Brownies Niagruisar, and describe them as little creatures with red caps on their beads, that bring luck to any place where they take up their abode.1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 259

Adjective capitalized: NIS

NIS

  1. (abbreviation, initialism, classified ads) Initialism of new in shrink.

Noun (2) capitalized: NIS

NIS (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Network Information Service.
    Synonyms:
    YP

Proper noun capitalized: NIS

NIS

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of Naftna Industrija Srbije, a Serbian multinational oil and gas company.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of National Intelligence Service, an agency of the South African government from 1980 to 1994.
  3. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of National Intelligence Service, the current South Korean counterintelligence agency.

Also used as

nis is also the contraction of ne is.

Synonyms of nis

Forms of nis

pluralnisses

Origin of nis

Borrowed from Danish nisse.

Questions about nis

What does nis mean?
Nis means a nix; a hobgoblin, especially one that resides in a farm house.
What part of speech is nis?
Nis can be a noun, an adjective or a proper noun.
What is the plural of nis?
The plural of nis is nisses.

Words near nis in the dictionary

  1. nirvana fallacy
  2. nirvanas
  3. nirvanic
  4. nirvanol
  5. nirwana
  6. nis
  7. nisab
  8. Nisaba
  9. Nisaea
  10. Nisaean
  11. Nisaian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nis (page history and authors); NIS (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:

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