soft

Meanings

Adjective

• Easily giving way under pressure.
• Smooth and flexible; not rough, rugged, or harsh.
• Quiet.
• Gentle.
• Expressing gentleness or tenderness; mild; conciliatory; courteous; kind.
• Gentle in action or motion; easy.
• Weak in character; impressible.
• Requiring little or no effort; easy.
• Not bright or intense.
• Having a slight angle from straight.
• Voiced; sonant.
• voiceless
• palatalized
• Lacking strength or resolve; not tough, wimpy.
• Low in dissolved calcium compounds.
• Foolish.
• Of a ferromagnetic material; a material that becomes essentially non-magnetic when an external magnetic field is removed, a material with a low magnetic coercivity. (compare hard)
• Physically or emotionally weak.
• Incomplete, or temporary; not a full action.
• Effeminate.
• Agreeable to the senses.
• Not harsh or offensive to the sight; not glaring or jagged; pleasing to the eye.
• Made up of nonparallel rays, tending to wrap around a subject and produce diffuse shadows.
• Emulated with software; not physically real.
• Not likely to cause addiction.
• Of a market: having more supply than demand; being a buyer's market.

Interjection

• Be quiet; hold; stop; not so fast.

Adverb

• Softly; without roughness or harshness; gently; quietly.

Noun

• A soft or foolish person; an idiot.
• A soft sound or part of a sound.

Related

Similar words

• non-abrasive, fluffy
• gentle, light, nesh
• quiet
• meek, mild, wimpy, nesh
• daft, foolish, silly, stupid

Opposite words

• hard, resistant, solid, stony
• abrasive, scratchy
• harsh, rough, strong
• hard
• loud
• firm, strict, tough
• sensible

Origin

• From Middle English softe, from Old English sōfte, alteration of earlier sēfte, from Proto-West Germanic *samftī ("level, even, smooth, soft, gentle") (compare *sōmiz), from Proto-Indo-European *semptio-, *semtio-, from *sem-. Cognate with West Frisian sêft ("gentle; soft"), Dutch zacht ("soft"), German Low German sacht ("soft"), German sanft ("soft, yielding"), Old Norse sœmr ("agreeable, fitting"), samr. More at seem, same.