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PlainSpell

glee

/ɡliː/noun, verb

glee is a noun meaning “Joy; happiness; great delight, especially from one's own good fortune or from another's misfortune” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled G-L-E-E and has one syllable, and it appears 3.1 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of glee is glees.

What does glee mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Joy; happiness; great delight, especially from one's own good fortune or from another's misfortune.

  2. 2

    Music; minstrelsy; entertainment.

  3. 3

    An unaccompanied part song for three or more solo voices, not necessarily merry.

verb

  1. 1

    To sing a glee (unaccompanied part song).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce glee?

  • /ɡliː/

Glee has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-glee.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of glee

  • glees plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • gleeing participle, present
  • gleed participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is glee?

Glee appears 3.1 times per million words in written English, the 15,146th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Glee in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchjoie (Joy; merriment; mirth; gayety; particularly…)
GermanFreude, Fröhlichkeit, Ausgelassenheit (Joy; merriment; mirth; gayety; particularly…), Rundgesang (Music; minstrelsy; entertainment)
Portuguesealegria (Joy; merriment; mirth; gayety; particularly…), música, canção (Music; minstrelsy; entertainment)
Spanishalegría (Joy; merriment; mirth; gayety; particularly…)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does glee come from?

From Middle English gle, from Old English glēo, glīġ, glēow, glīw (“glee, pleasure, mirth, play, sport; music; mockery”), from Proto-West Germanic *glīw, from Proto-Germanic *glīwą (“joy, mirth”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰlew- (“to joke, make fun, enjoy”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).