Basic

//ˈbeɪsɪk// adj, name, noun, slang

adj, name, noun, slang ·Common ·Middle school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A necessary commodity, a staple requirement.

    "Rice is a basic for many Asian villagers."

  2. 2
    (usually in the plural) a necessary commodity for which demand is constant wordnet
  3. 3
    An elementary building block, e.g. a fundamental piece of knowledge.

    "Arithmetic is a basic for the study of mathematics."

  4. 4
    a popular programming language that is relatively easy to learn; an acronym for beginner's all-purpose symbolic instruction code; no longer in general use wordnet
  5. 5
    Basic training.

    "The drill sergeants gave him hell in basic."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Necessary, essential for life or some process.

    "Flour is a basic ingredient of bread."

  2. 2
    Elementary, simple, fundamental, merely functional.

    "The Hotel Sparta’s accommodation is very basic."

  3. 3
    Of or pertaining to a base; having a pH greater than 7.
  4. 4
    Unremarkable or uninteresting; boring; uncool. informal

    "I'm not saying people are jealous of Hathaway because she is so perfect. Yes, she does have it all — husband, healthy career, good looks. But she doesn't do anything in an "awesome" way. She's basic."

Adjective
  1. 1
    of or denoting or of the nature of or containing a base wordnet
  2. 2
    serving as a base or starting point wordnet
  3. 3
    pertaining to or constituting a base or basis wordnet
  4. 4
    reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality wordnet
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    Any of a family of third-generation programming languages.

    "Many programs were written for the Sinclair Spectrum computer in BASIC."

  2. 2
    Initialism of Brazil, South Africa, India and China. abbreviation, alt-of, attributive, initialism
  3. 3
    Initialism of British American Security Information Council. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
  4. 4
    A family of third-generation computer programming languages (c.1964 on).

    "Many programs were written for the Sinclair Spectrum computer in BASIC."

Synonyms

All synonyms
basalelementaryradicalunderlyingalkalineab ovo

Example

More examples

"I think your basic theory is wrong."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From base + -ic.

Etymology 2

Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but designed to spell out basic (i.e. simplistic). First use appears c. 1964 in the BASIC Instruction Manual.

Etymology 3

An initialism of Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Related phrases

Basic Englishbasic Bbasic balancebasic beliefbasic bitchbasic blockbasic brobasic cablebasic edbasic educationbasic formbasic ignition timing

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.