precious
Syllables: pre·cious/ˈpɹɛʃ.əs/
precious adjective: of high value or worth.
Adjective
precious (comparative more precious, superlative most precious)
- Of high value or worth.
- The crown had many precious gemstones. This building work needs site access, and tell the city council that I don't care about a few lorry tyre ruts across their precious grass verge.
- People are a good thing, the most precious resource in a rich economy, so the progressive-minded feel. Only misanthropists disagree or the dottier Malthusians who send green-ink tweets deploring any state assistance for child-rearing.2013 August 16, Polly Toynbee, “Britain's booming birthrate”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 10, page 21
- Synonyms:
- dear, valuable, without price, estimable, worthy, worthly, prizable, treasurous, worth every penny, invaluable
- Regarded with love or tenderness.
- The way my partner looks at me is just so precious.
- Treated with too much reverence.
- He spent hours painting the eyes of the portrait, which his fellow artists regarded as a bit precious.
- Excessively complicated.
- Extremely protective or strict (about something).
- Writers are often very precious about their work.
- Pro chefs can be very precious about their kit. Watch a bartender trying to borrow a simple, cheap fruit-knife from the kitchen and you'll see what I mean.2009 September 16, Charlie Sorrel, “Chef’s Travel Bag: A Kitchen On Your Back”, in Wired, San Francisco, Calif.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 24 Mar 2023
- Blasted; damned.
- It’s all owing to your precious caution that they got hold of it. If you had let me burn it, and taken my word that it was gone, it would have been a heap of ashes behind the fire, instead of being whole and sound, inside of my great-coat.1839, Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
- Synonyms:
- confounded, ever-loving, raasclaat, 4ucking, accursed, bally, blasted, bleeding, bleeping, blessed
- Contrived to be cute or charming.
- In the abstract, Stuhlbarg’s twinkly-eyed sidekick suggests Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2 by way of late-period Robin Williams with an alien twist, but Stuhlbarg makes a character that easily could have come across as precious into a surprisingly palatable, even charming man.2012 May 24, Nathan Rabin, “Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3”, in The Onion AV Club
- Synonyms:
- saccharine, syrupy, twee
- Thorough; utter.
- a precious rascal
Noun
precious (plural preciouses)
- Someone (or something) who is loved; a darling.
- “It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?”1937, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
- She sat down with the dogs in her lap. "I won't neglect you for any one, will I, my preciouses?"1909, Mrs. Teignmouth Shore, The Pride of the Graftons, page 57
Adverb
precious (not comparable)
- Very; an intensifier.
- There is precious little we can do.
- precious few pictures of him exist
Proper noun capitalized: Precious
Precious
- A surname transferred from the nickname, originating as a male or female nickname.
- A female given name from English.
- She and Mma Ramotswe were fortunate, with their reasonably straightforward names of Grace and Precious respectively; she had contemporaries who were not so fortunate and had been saddled by their parents with names that were frankly ridiculous.2009, Alexander McCall Smith, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Abacus, published 2010, →ISBN, page 6
precious meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu
precious in Hindi
- of high value or worth
- क़ीमती qīmtī, प्यारा pyārā
precious in Tamil
- of high value or worth
- விலையுர்ந்த vilaiyurnta, விலைமதிப்பற்ற vilaimatippaṟṟa
precious in Marathi
- of high value or worth
- मूल्यवान mūlyavān
precious in Urdu
- of high value or worth
- قیمتی qīmtī
More languagesFewer languages
- precious in Bengali
- মূল্যবান mulloban
- precious in Telugu
- అమూల్యమైన amūlyamaina
- precious in Malayalam
- പിലയേറിയ pilayēṟiya
- precious in Kannada
- ಅತ್ಯಮೂಲ್ಯ atyamūlya
- precious in Punjabi
- ਕ਼ੀਮਤੀ qīmtī
- precious in Gujarati
- કિંમતી
- precious in Sanskrit
- सार sāra
- precious in Nepali
- अमूल्य amūlya
- precious in Arabic
- ثَمِين ṯamīn
- precious in Indonesian
- berharga
- precious in Persian
- گرانبها gerânbahâ
- precious in Thai
- มีค่า mee kâa, มีประโยชน์ mee bprà-yòht
- precious in Vietnamese
- quý, quý báu
- precious in Myanmar
- အဖိုးတန် a.hpui:tan
Examples of precious in a sentence
- I wrote all these songs very quickly; I did a whole lot of material and wasn't too precious about it.2016 February 4, Spencer Kornhaber, quoting Jeremy Greenspan, “The Postindustrial Electronic Bar-Fly Blues”, in The Atlantic, Washington...
- Hearing what a struggle it was for her, I began to understand why some people are so precious about being Irish.2016 November 20, Katie Walsh, “Why are Irish people so precious about Irishness?”, in The Irish Times, Dublin: Irish Times Trust, →ISSN...
Synonyms of precious
- dear
- valuable
- without price
- worthy
- worthly
- prizable
- worth every penny
- invaluable
- priceless
- worth one's weight in gold
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of precious
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more precious |
| superlative | most precious |
| alternative form (obsolete) | pretious |
| Noun | |
| plural | preciouses |
Origin of precious
Inherited from Middle English precious, borrowed from Old French precios (“valuable, costly, precious, beloved, also affected, finical”), from Latin pretiōsus (“of great value, costly, dear, precious”), from pretium (“value, price”); see price.
Words formed from precious
Phrases with precious
Questions about precious
- What does precious mean?
- Precious means of high value or worth.
- What is precious in Hindi?
- Precious in Hindi is क़ीमती (qīmtī), प्यारा (pyārā). See Precious meaning in Hindi.
- How do you use precious in a sentence?
- I wrote all these songs very quickly; I did a whole lot of material and wasn't too precious about it.
- What part of speech is precious?
- Precious can be an adjective, a noun, an adverb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce precious?
- Precious is pronounced /ˈpɹɛʃ.əs/.
Words near precious in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: precious (page history and authors); Precious (page history and authors); ਕ਼ੀਮਤੀ (Punjabi) (page history and authors); precious (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); सार (Sanskrit) (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-precious.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Back ache-precious.wav.
Cite this entry: “precious.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/precious. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.