How Words Change Meaning
Ask someone what 'awful' means and they will say terrible. In the fourteenth century it meant 'full of awe' — something you said about a cathedral, not a film. Nothing about the word itself changed. The people using it did.
Four directions of drift
Meaning narrows when a word's range shrinks: 'meat' once meant any food, now animal flesh. It widens when the range grows: 'bird' once referred to a nestling. It improves (amelioration) when a word gains status — 'nice' travelled from 'foolish' to 'pleasant'. It decays (pejoration) when a word loses status — 'villain' began as a farm labourer.
Why drift happens
Words shift because they are used by people with different needs. Euphemisms soften a taboo and then become the taboo themselves. Borrowing from another language pulls in new senses. Irony wears a word's meaning away: say 'brilliant' about something mediocre often enough and the word stops being a compliment.
What this tells us about language
Dictionaries record usage; they do not authorise it. A word is correct when a community understands it, and communities are always in motion. That is not decline — it is the mechanism by which a language stays usable across centuries of change.
Knowledge check
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What is semantic narrowing?
What happened to the word 'villain'?
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