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modest

adjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈmɑdəst//

Not bragging or boasting about oneself or one's achievements; unpretentious, humble.

adjective

  1. 1

    Not bragging or boasting about oneself or one's achievements; unpretentious, humble.

  2. 2

    Small, moderate in size.

    He earns a modest amount of money.

    Her latest novel was a modest success.

  3. 3

    Pure and delicate from a sense of propriety.

    modest thoughts or language

  4. 4

    Intending to avoid the encouraging of sexual attraction in others.

Etymology

From Middle French modeste, from Latin modestus.

Forms

comparative
more modest, modester
superlative
most modest, modestest
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).