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Before a mouse named Mickey ruled the animation scene, there was Felix—a wily black cat who is often regarded as the first cartoon star, and who became an international sensation in the early 20th century for films such as Felix in Hollywood (1923) and Comicalamities (1928). “Felix,” you might say, was a felicitous—that is, apt—name for the happy, Chaplinesque feline. Felix, after all, is a Latin word meaning “happy” or “fruitful,” and the ancestor of the English adjective felicitous, which can mean both “pleasant and delightful,” and “very well suited or expressed.” With regard to the “apt” sense of felicitous, it’s important to note that it is most often applied to someone’s actions or expressions (as in “a felicitous phrase”). In other words, no matter how fitting someone’s choice of pants may be for, say, the world premiere of a new animated movie, it would not be fitting to say “they arrived at the theater wearing felicitous pants.”
Examples of felicitous in a Sentence
ABC News, 8 Apr. 2026
Nara Lee, from South Korea, and Barry Collins, from the UK, had much more felicitous travel experiences.
—Maureen O'Hare, CNN Money, 23 Aug. 2025
No surprise, then, the old playbook is in tatters without a sufficiently clear pathway to a more felicitous future.
—Paul Laudicina, Forbes.com, 15 Apr. 2025
Yet the private life of the royal couple was rumored to be a far from felicitous one, with many stories of infidelities trickling out before and after the princess was killed in a car crash in 1982 at the age of fifty-two.
—Rob Crossan, JSTOR Daily, 21 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for felicitous
Cite this Entry
“Felicitous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/felicitous. Accessed 19 Jun. 2026.
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felicitous
adjective
