# simple

Pronunciation: say "SIM-puhl" /ˈsɪm.pəl/

## Adjective

1. Not complicated in structure or content; easy to understand, use, or do.
   - Simple: Not complicated. Easy to understand or do.
   - _The app has a simple design, so even first-time users can book a ride in under a minute._
   - _His argument was simple: fewer moving parts meant fewer failures._
2. Without decoration or ornament; plain in appearance.
   - Simple: Plain and not decorated in any way.
   - _He lived in a simple cottage without any fancy trimmings._
   - _The chapel's simple interior had no carvings or gilded edges._
3. Free from deceit; honest, innocent, and straightforward.
   - Simple: Honest and open, without tricks or lies.
   - _Her simple honesty made it impossible for her to lie._
   - _The child looked up with a simple, trusting smile._
5. Lacking normal intelligence; foolish or feeble-minded. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: Not very smart and slow to understand things.
   - _The villagers unkindly called him simple and laughed at his mistakes._
   - _She was too simple to notice she was being cheated._
4. Mere; being only what is stated and nothing more.
   - Simple: Being only that and nothing more than what is named.
   - _She left early for the simple reason that nobody asked her to stay._
   - _The simple fact is that we cannot afford a new roof this year._
6. Of ordinary social standing; of no special rank.
   - Simple: Belonging to ordinary people, not rich or important.
   - _He was a simple tradesman, unknown beyond his village._
   - _The simple folk of the region rarely met anyone from the court._
8. Consisting of a single part, element, layer, or substance; not compound, divided, branched, or mixed, as in a simple leaf, stem, lens, or epithelium, or an organism living as a single individual.
   - Simple: Made of just one part, layer or substance, not combined with others or split into separate pieces.
   - _Early chemists tried to reduce every material to its simple components._
   - _A simple substance cannot be broken down into other substances by chemical means._

## Adjective

7. Trivial or insignificant; of little importance or weight. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: Small and not important, hardly worth noticing.

## Verb

9. To gather simples (that is, medicinal herbs) from the wild. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: To gather plants that are used to make medicine.

## Noun

10. A substance or thing that is not mixed or compounded with anything else. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: A single thing that is not mixed with anything else.
11. A physician; a person who practices medicine. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: A doctor, a person who treats people who are ill.

## Other meanings

- (noun) An herbal preparation made from a single plant rather than from several.
- (noun) An atomic proposition; a statement that contains no smaller statements within it.
- (adjective) In algebra, of a group, ring, module, Lie algebra, or other algebraic structure or object: non-trivial and having no proper non-trivial quotients. Equivalently, it has no proper non-trivial normal subgroups, ideals, submodules, or congruences.
- (adjective) Of a steam engine: using steam only once in its cylinders, unlike a compound engine that reuses it at high and low pressure.
- (adjective) Of a function, formed by adding together finitely many indicator functions of measurable sets, each multiplied by a constant.
- (noun) In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, a feast ranked below a double or a semidouble.
- (noun) A drawloom; a loom used for weaving figured or patterned fabrics.
- (noun) A part of the drawloom apparatus used to raise the heddles that lift the warp threads.

## Origin

Latin simplex ("simple," literally "onefold," the opposite of duplex, "twofold"), built from sem- ("one, single-") and -plex ("-fold"), passed into Old French as simple and into Middle English as symple. Single and singular are related words, and this one partly replaced native English onefold.

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