# aesthetic

Pronunciation: say "es-THE-tik" /ɛsˈθɛ.tɪk/

## Adjective

1. Concerned with beauty, artistic effect, or the way something appears.
   - Simple: Having to do with beauty, art, or how something looks.
   - _Critics praised the film for its aesthetic qualities rather than its plot._
   - _The committee weighed aesthetic concerns against practical costs._
5. Beautiful or pleasing to one's sense of beauty or art, a use that a few careful writers object to.
   - Simple: Beautiful, or pleasing to your sense of beauty or art. A few people think this use is wrong.
   - _Neighbors complained that the concrete footbridge over the river was less than aesthetic._
   - _Her friends kept saying the hand-painted mugs she sold at the market were really aesthetic._

## Noun

2. The set of artistic motifs that define a collection of works, or more loosely their overall mood or vibe.
   - Simple: The overall style and look that ties a group of things together.
   - _The brand built its entire aesthetic around minimalism and clean lines._
   - _Fans recognized the album's gritty aesthetic from the first track._
3. The qualities of something that make it pleasing to the senses, especially its appearance; usually in the plural, aesthetics.
   - Simple: The way something looks, sounds, or feels that makes it pleasant. Usually used in the plural, aesthetics.
   - _Architects must balance cost and safety against aesthetics when they design a public building._
   - _The chef cares about the aesthetic of each plate as much as its flavor._
4. The study of art or beauty and of how we judge them, now usually called aesthetics; also, one thinker's theory of beauty.
   - Simple: The study of beauty and art, now usually called aesthetics, or one person's ideas about what makes things beautiful.
   - _Hume's aesthetic grounded judgments of beauty in human feeling rather than fixed rules._
   - _She approached aesthetics less as abstract theory than as the study of everyday taste._

## Origin

Ancient Greek αἰσθάνομαι (aisthánomai, "I feel") gave αἰσθητικός (aisthētikós, "of sense perception"), which New Latin borrowed as aesthēticus. English took the word from either French esthétique or German Ästhetik, both based on that Latin form.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/aesthetic (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).