I know that “well” (as in the adverb “to do well”) has a superlative form, “best,” but this is suppletive, and I’ve always wanted to know what the original, as in, the last, not suppletive, superlative form of “well” (same usage as before) was, since “best” just doesn’t sound right, and it’s the superlative form of “good” as well, so saying “best” could mean two completely different things.
The original superlative form of well
etymologyword-usage
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Best Answer
‘wellest’ was a non-Standard usage with origins dating back to early 19th century:
Update: Since someone pointed out n-gram was inaccurate. I will refer to OED for this, which says that the form was non-Standard, but it did exist and fallen out of usage like the n-gram suggests. Note, this is taken from the OED’s dictionary entry on “well”.