More recently I was thinking to myself that there are some words that thru time have lost most or all of their original meaning. Some examples of this phenomenon are…
Fabulous. Present Meaning: Wonderful; superb; very good. Original Meaning: Related to fables. Thus story-like or (ironically) not true, not believable.
Fantastic. Present Meaning: Like Fabulous: wonderful; superb; very good. Original Meaning: Related to fantasies. Also could mean hard to believe.
Corn. Present Meaning: A yellow food plant. A grain that grows on a cob and is usu. prepared like a vegetable. “Maize” in most other English-speaking countries. Original Meaning: Simply the native grain of any country or locale. Wheat in England, Oats in Scotland, etc. (BTW, Cecil talks about this very subject in one of his books.)
Decimate. Present Meaning: To utterly destroy. To kill off or destroy large numbers of (people, animals–sometimes inanimate things too). Original Meaning: From the Latin decimus meaning “every tenth”, this was an ancient Roman method of weeding out traitors in their ranks. Every tenth man was selected and killed until the guilty party came forth–or was driven insane in the process :eek: .
Well, that is all I can come up with for now. So my question is this:
What other words have lost their original meaning?
Nice: It started off meaning foolish, stupid (from Latin nescius - unknowing), then migrated through wanton --> strange --> tender --> coy and a few others before settling into its modern meanings of 1. precise and 2. pleasant.
Clown: Used to mean a countryman, a peasant or rustic.
Presently: This bore the meaning of straight away, without delay (as logically it should), it now means in a little while, as soon as I can.
This is a very common lexical drift. “Soon” itself used to mean immediately. It’s a testiment to human ability for procrastination that the word for immediate action keeps getting delayed and requires replacing. I think this why medicine now uses the term ‘stat’, as other terms have already begun to drift.
Other example:
“Silly” used to mean “holy”. The meaning drifted from holy to mean “not worldly” to meaning “naive” to meaning “a bit stupid”.
Item – in Latin, it meant “Also”. I’ve heard that it was used in making up lists in monasteries and such for inventory. “Also, a ladder. Also, a barrel.” In Latin this was “Item: [ladder], Item [barrel]”, so each thing came to be called an “item”.
Toilet used to be a more general word used to describe a variety of activities related to getting oneself ready. At the turn of the century (the one before this one) if you said “She was making her toilet,” you meant she was getting dressed.
A lot of the words mentioned so far still retain their old meaning (ecstasy, gay, handicap, spin.)
Are you asking for a few random examples of words changing their meanings, or are you asking for every example in English? There are (at least) thousands of such examples, many of them with even more complicated and interesting histories than the ones already given. Some good books about changes in the meanings of English words are Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary by Geoffrey Hughes, Studies in Words by C. S. Lewis, History in English Words by Owen Barfield, and Keywords by Raymond Williams.
The word “want” has changed meaning over the centuries. Originally it meant “lack” or “need”, either a noun or a verb. “I want that” meant “I need that”. The word has moved over to its modern meaning of “desire”. In other words, it has moved from an objective statement of a lack, to a subjective feeling about lacking
We still see the old-fashioned meaning in a lot of old-fashioned sayings and phrases. Wilful waste makes woeful want. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. The war on want. He wants for nothing.
The new meaning is still quite recent. You will often see the old meaning used in books at least until the end of the 19th century.
I think you can see it far more recently, and IMHO, the word ‘want’ still retains a degree of its original meaning. See War On Want for an example.
Have to agree with RickJay, a lot of the examples quoted so far are very poor as they do not show a word’s meaning being completely altered. Spin still means to rotate. Ecstasy as a drug reference is already showing signs of dating, it still means a state of euphoria.
AFAIK, the decimatio wasn’t intended to weed out traitors but as the ultimate punishment for a military unit which for instance had fled the battle, or displayed some shameful behavior.
These are some of the other examples that I don’t feel have changed their meanings in the way described:
Spin still means rotate (although usually to rotate fast), in nearly all cases.
Ecstasy is still used for it’s non-drug meaning, usually in more elaborate texts.
The definition of sleeping has not changed much. For obvious reasons, it has always had a certain a sexual connection, when you are sleeping with someone. However, in neither modern or past English, has simply going to sleep, or sleeping had a sexual connotation.
These are my additions:
Party, Impact and Access have been given additional uses as a verb in recent years.
Nowadays, Brilliant and Excellent are usually used as exclamation instead of descriptors.
Faggot has had several meanings - variety of liver, bundle of sticks, unpleasant woman (apparently) before progressing to today’s homosexual association.
Albeit is gradually becoming a synonym for although instead of through.
Virtual has lost much of it’s original meaning beneath a pile of early nineties hype products.
Mouses has changed from a schoolchild error to the acceptable plural for a computer mouse.
Oh yes, and a big one I forgot: Black. As most of us should be aware, this used to apply to anyone non-white, but now it is exclusively used (by the PC) for people of an African ancestry
There should be a distinction made between words like spin and ecstacy which have undergone semantic extension; as opposed to words like nice and awful which have undergone a true semantic shift.
Consider:
wit - once meant “knowledge” (cf. German “Wissen”).
jeopardy - derived from French “jeu parti” (approx. “divided game”), once meant something near the old meaning of handicap above – a game of chance.
meat - once meant “food”, be it vegetable, animal flesh, or grain.
starve - once meant “to die, pass away” (cf. O.E. “steorfan”, German “gestorben, verstorben”).
beast - once only applied to deer, elk, and other superficially similar four-legged herbivores (cf. Dutch-derived “hartebeest”).
lady - once meant, roughly, “bread woman” (O.E. “hlaefdig”).
There are thousands more of such examples in English.
I go with Ascenray in the idea that most ALL words in English have changed meaning via usage over the years. Look at the OED and how almost every word has an example of its use amd meaning throughout the recorded use of the language.