groovy: excellent; enjoyable; trendily cool

Groovy is the slang word that never wears out. Sometimes it goes away for a while, but then it's recycled, good as new. The word evolved in the 1930s from the jazz expression in the groove, which meant to be playing easily and smoothly, as though inspired. The "groove" may have referred to the spiral grooves cut into vinyl records, or it could simply refer to moving easily along a musical channel. A 1937 volume of American Speech defines groovey (with an "e") as "a state of mind which is conducive to good playing." It could also refer to the state of mind of appreciative jazz listeners. The word's meaning broadened to cover anything hip, cool, or otherwise good. By the late 1950s groovy had run its course, as evidenced by the fact that it began appearing in ads for items like orange juice.

The story wasn't over yet though. After languishing on the slang discard pile for several years, groovy came back into fashion in the 1960s, this time as an all-purpose term of commendation. Hippies adopted it first, but it soon went mainstream. Then, as the sixties turned into the seventies, groovy became less and less cool. By the eighties the word was finished -- or was it? In the twenty-first century, groovy is once more heard around college campuses, apparently as a genuine piece of slang.

Although groovy itself didn't appear until the twentieth century, the word it comes from -- groove -- is much older. It goes all the way back to the Indo-European *ghrebh- 'to dig or bury'. It's related to Middle Dutch groeve 'ditch', Swedish grava 'to bury', and Old High German graban 'to dig'. Grave and engrave also come from the same root.