Skip to content
OneKitly

novice

nounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈnɑvɪs//
  • Canada//ˈnɒvɪs//
  • Australia//ˈnɔvɪs//
  • Australia//ˈnɒvɪs//

A beginner; one who is not very familiar or experienced in a particular subject.

noun

  1. 1

    A beginner; one who is not very familiar or experienced in a particular subject.

    I'm only a novice at coding, so my programs frequently have bugs that more experienced programmers would avoid.

  2. 2

    A new member of a religious order accepted on a conditional basis, prior to confirmation.

    Nor had it been difficult to find a Coptic priest who, together with his youthful novice, chanted the seemingly interminable Egyptian service of the dead […]

Etymology

From Middle English novice, novys, from Anglo-Norman novice, Middle French novice, itself borrowed from Latin novīcius, later novitius (“new, newly arrived”) (in Late Latin as a noun, masculine novicius, feminine novicia (“one who has newly entered a monastery or a convent”)), from novus (“new”).

adjective

  1. 1

    Of a beginner; unfamiliar or unexperienced in a particular subject.

Forms

plural
novices
comparative
more novice
superlative
most novice
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).