What Other Words Have Lost Their Original Meanings?

That usage might become widespread, at which point the word would take on another meaning. But it hasn’t happened yet. When it’s just a few people using a word in a particular way, and they aren’t part of a community that’s using the word to each other, the word doesn’t have a new meaning; that usage is just wrong.

No, the well-cared-for just isn’t part of the meaning at all. A head librarian who uses circulation data to decide what books to cycle out of the collection and what to get more copies of, and watches the bestseller lists and patron requests to add new books, is curating the collection, even if they don’t do anything about that pipe leak that keeps on causing water damage to all of the books below it.

Yes, it’s the fact that they’re using it the wrong way is what irks me. I know that “bespoke” still retains its original definition in certain contexts.

And if you really want to nitpick, it was originally “bespoken.” The shortening–which little babies love–came later.

Right. But still, even if The Bard wasnt the first to write a word, it certainly wasnt all that popular before him.

Right. It does happen that words are misused- and sometimes that new “meaning” makes its way into common usage. But not always, and apparently not in this case.

There’s a question on quora from five years ago asking about it, so it’s here, like it or not!

“Sibling” has become a common word in the course of my lifetime (I remember learning that German had a word for “brother or sister” and had to think a moment to think of the English equivalent, because it was a fairly obscure word at the time). Google Ngram show a steady growth in popularity starting at 1920, and looking at a 1960 dictionary (Webster’s New World Dictionary College edition), I see that “sibling” isn’t even in there (though “sib” is).

Curiously - “sibling” has no one-word equivalent in French. How about other languages?

As I mentioned- German has one: Geschwister, blbut that’s only a plural (siblings).

Interestingly, that is cognate to English sister.

And so is the German word for sister (Schwester)

In Japanese, the word generally used is 兄弟, kyodai which literally means “brothers” but is used as “siblings.”

If you want want to specify how many brothers a person had you need to say “male brothers”, but you can use brothers to say “They are brothers.”

There is a word for sisters, 姉妹 shimai, but you never ask how many brothers and sisters do you have.

Hebrew does the same thing with the masculine plural form achim.