nonpareil

1. 1.

   eminent beyond or above comparison

   “matchless beauty”

   “the team's nonpareil center fielder”

   “she's one girl in a million”

   “the one and only Muhammad Ali”

   “a peerless scholar”

   “infamy unmatched in the Western world”

   “wrote with unmatchable clarity”

   “unrivaled mastery of her art”

   Synonymsmatchlessoneone and onlypeerlessunmatchedunmatchableunrivaledunrivalled

   Similarincomparable

Other forms of nonpareil

plural

nonpareils·

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.

Questions about nonpareil

What does nonpareil mean?

nonpareil means "model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in nonpareil?

nonpareil has 3 syllables and divides as non-pa-reil under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for nonpareil?

Close synonyms include ideal, paragon, saint, apotheosis, nonesuch. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is nonpareil a common word?

nonpareil is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.