Skip to content
OneKitly

praise

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pɹɛjz//
  • United States//pɹeɪz//
  • Australia//pɹæɪz//
  • Scotland//pɾez//
  • Scotland/[pɾeːz]/

Commendation; favourable representation in words.

noun

  1. 1

    Commendation; favourable representation in words.

    The writer's latest novel received great praise in the media.

    You deserve praise for the hard work you've done recently.

    She gave them some faint praise for their assignments, despite not being totally convinced by the quality.

    dim praise

  2. 2

    Worship, glorification, adoration.

    praise of God

    Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.

Etymology

From Middle English praise, preyse, from the verb (see below). Doublet of prize. Displaced native Middle English lof from Old English lof (“praise”) and Middle English loenge, loange from Old French löenge, löange (“praise”).

verb

  1. 1

    To give praise to; to commend, glorify, or worship.

    Be sure to praise Bobby for his excellent work at school this week.

    Some of the passengers were heard praising God as the stricken plane landed safely.

Etymology

From Middle English praisen, preisen, from Old French proisier, preisier (“to value, prize”), from Late Latin pretiō (“to value, prize”) from pretium (“price, worth, reward”). Displaced native Middle English herien from Old English herian (“to praise”).

Forms

plural
praises
past tense
praised
past participle
praised
present participle
praising
third person singular
praises
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).