deign [ME] To deign is to condescend to do something, and the word is bound up with ‘dignity’. It goes back to Latin dignare ‘to judge to be worthy’, which was formed from dignus ‘worthy’, the source of dignity [ME], and dignify [LME], and the negative disdain [ME] ‘consider unworthy’. Dainty [ME] is also from dignus by way of an earlier form, daintith. It once meant ‘honour, worth’ as a noun and ‘valuable, fine, excellent’ before becoming ‘pleasing to taste’ or ‘delicately pretty’ in Late Middle English.