seldom
- 01 C1 Advanced
rare or not happening very much.
occurring or appearing infrequently; rare.
Simple“The museum only shows these seldom seen paintings once a year.”
In context“The scholar spent years researching the seldom visited archives of the remote monastery to find the original manuscript.”
UsageIn modern English, this is almost exclusively used as an adverb; the adjective form is restricted to specific literary contexts.
Synonyms
“A celebrity autobiography is seldom the work of the celebrity herself.”
“El Niño and La Niña events are important drivers of these compound events, but the events seldom happen at the weather events' epicenter in the equatorial Pacific.”
From late Middle English seldom, alteration of earlier selden by analogy with adverbial datives such as whilom, from Old English seldan (“seldom”), from Proto-West Germanic seldanā, from Proto-Germanic seldanē. Cognate with Saterland Frisian säilden (“seldom”), West Frisian selden, komselden (“rare, seldom”), Dutch zelden, German selten, Danish sjælden, Norwegian Bokmål sjelden, Norwegian Nynorsk sjeldan, Swedish sällan, Faroese sjáldan, Icelandic sjaldan. More at seld and selly.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.