Semantic drift

A permanent process

Historical linguistics — how meanings move

The slow migration of a word's sense away from where it started, so that nice once meant ignorant, silly once meant blessed, and awful once meant full of awe. Linguists classify the moves: broadening and narrowing, where a word covers more or less ground than before; amelioration and pejoration, where it rises or falls in the world; plus metaphor and metonymy. Because the drift is gradual, every generation notices it only in the words that are moving at the time, which is why usage disputes are usually arguments about a change already half complete.

How to spot them

▸A word whose modern sense contradicts its etymology
▸Nice from Latin nescius, ignorant; silly from Old English sælig, blessed
▸The four standard directions: broadening, narrowing, amelioration, pejoration
▸The word for food in general survives only in the compound for a sugared one

Key facts

A word that began as Latin nescius, ignorant, then meant fastidious, then agreeable

Nice — the Oxford English Dictionary records well over a dozen distinct senses in sequence

Old English sælig meant blessed or fortunate; the modern sense is the opposite kind of simplicity

Silly — a textbook case of pejoration

Awful once meant full of awe, and terrific once meant causing terror

Both weakened; awesome then moved in to fill the gap

Old English mete meant food of any sort, which is why a sugared one is a sweetmeat

Meat — narrowing, from the general to the particular

The word once covered any wild animal, as its German cognate Tier still does

Deer, from Old English dēor

In Chaucer's time the word could denote a young person of either sex

Girl — a knave girl was a boy

A farm worker attached to an estate became, by stages, the wickedest character in the story

Villain, from Latin villa; the same root gives villager

A ball of thread in a Cretan labyrinth became the general word for a piece of evidence

Clue, earlier clew — Ariadne's thread

Key ideas

Four directions are usually distinguished. Broadening: a word covers more than before (dog was once a particular breed). Narrowing: it covers less (hound, starve, wife). Amelioration: it rises in standing (knight, nice, pretty). Pejoration: it falls (silly, villain, vulgar, notorious).
Meanings also move by metaphor (a crane for lifting) and by metonymy, where a part stands for a whole or a container for its contents — the Crown for the monarchy, the bench for the judiciary.

Quick-fire facts

•Nice came into English from Old French, ultimately from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'
•Starve is from Old English steorfan, simply 'to die'; the German sterben keeps that sense
•Bead comes from Old English gebed, a prayer — the beads counted the prayers, then took their name
•Companion means one you break bread with, from Latin com- and panis
•Sinister is Latin for 'left'; dexterous is from the word for 'right'
•Glamour is a Scots variant of grammar, which in the Middle Ages meant learning and hence magic
•Bully was once a term of endearment, and to be bullish was to be like a sweetheart
•Quarantine is from Italian quaranta, forty — the days a ship was held off Venice
•Naughty originally meant having naught, that is, poor
•Decimate meant the killing of one man in ten, a Roman punishment; its modern use is one of the commonest complaints in usage guides

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources

Geoffrey Hughes — Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary
David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language