Word.ws English Dictionary

onlest

onlest adjective: only.

Adjective

onlest (not comparable)

  1. (US, dated, dialectal, possibly, especially African-American Vernacular) Only.
    • I'm the onlest father them boys has got.
    • I knowed the onlest thing to get her cured was to get a bucket of ice water, […]c. 1850-1970, Scott Dunbar, quoted in 2009 by William R. Ferris in Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues →ISBN

Origin of onlest

Variant of onliest.

Questions about onlest

What does onlest mean?
Onlest means only.
What part of speech is onlest?
Onlest is an adjective.

Words near onlest in the dictionary

  1. onled
  2. onlend
  3. onlending
  4. onlends
  5. onlent
  6. onlest
  7. Onley
  8. Onleys
  9. onlie
  10. onlier
  11. onliers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: onlest (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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