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say it: BAY-sik
basic is an adjective and noun meaning "pertaining to or constituting a base or basis". It carries 6 recorded senses.
pertaining to or constituting a base or basis
“a basic fact”
“the basic ingredients”
“basic changes in public opinion occur because of changes in priorities”
reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality
“a basic story line”
“a canonical syllable pattern”
serving as a base or starting point
“a basic course in Russian”
“basic training for raw recruits”
“a set of basic tools”
“an introductory art course”
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
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for basic come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.