How Words Have Changed Over Time

By Jillian Smoker, Grade 7 

Imagine you and your dad are arguing about the best way to listen to music. He says, "Back in my day records were totally groovy." You respond, "What the heck does groovy mean?"

Many could say they have been in a situation like this. Words change all the time over generations, sometimes making it hard to keep up with what's obsolete and what's popular. The real question is, how do words change so much?

Different Ways That Words Can Change:

Learning Words

After people are taught new words, each person has to make sense of what they hear. Since everyone's experience and understanding with this is different, random differences in speech can spread from person to person. For example, when your teacher teaches you a new word, you may misinterpret it; then, you tell your friends what you thought the word meant and the new meaning spreads around the whole school.

Different Languages

When people meet someone with a different language or dialect than their own, they sometimes take on some of the same pronunciations and words that they hear. This, again, can spread, making new words or changing already present words.

Repetition

Sometimes, when a person is talking in a fast or casual fashion, they start to mispronounce their words or drop some of the letters at the end. Doing this a few times will not change anything, but once they start making it a habit, they soon start pronouncing the word like that all the time. If the mistake is so common among people, the word can be formed into something new.

Some Of The Results From Language Change:

Different Dialects Or Languages Are Born

When words change in one area and not the other, it is possible that new dialects would be formed. An example of this could be when settlers arrived in North America and their English dialect soon differed from the dialect of English in Britain. In the same way, new languages can be created too.

New Meanings

Because of language change, some words change meaning completely (some examples are shown below) or become obsolete and are soon forgotten. Old words are soon replaced with new words as the world evolves; this is the reason why it would be hard to understand a book written a hundred years ago.

Words That Have Changed Meaning Completely:

Awful

In Old English, 'awe' meant "fear, terror, or dread." Later 'awe' turned into wonder and both awful and awesome meant awe inspiring. Later, 'awful' took on a bad meaning while 'awesome' meant extremely good.

Nice

'Nice' used to be a negative term for a foolish person, but, in the 14th and 15th centuries, it became a word for someone finely dressed or who was shy. The word turned into a positive word in the 16th century where it described a polite society.

Literally

Nowadays, people sometimes use 'literally' to stress their point, but it used to only be used for "a literal way or sense." Because of this, the Oxford Dictionary had to change its definition so that it can be "used for emphasis rather than being actually true."

Bully

People used to call each other 'bully' and it meant the same thing as saying 'darling' or 'sweetheart'; however, people now use it to define a "harasser of the weak."

Fantastic

The 14th century meaning of 'fantastic' was "existing only in imagination"; now we use the word to describe something amazing.

Meat

'Meat' used to mean any solid food, unlike now where it is only used to describe animal flesh.

Broadcast

Now a broadcast can be described as a way a channel spreads news, but it used to literally mean 'broad cast' and described people sowing seeds with a sweeping movement.

Words are only one of the many things that change throughout time, and they help show how much the world has really evolved. Without these different kinds of changes, we would still be stuck in the 1800s when (gasp) there was no such thing as video games. Sometimes we think that changes are bad, but some of them are really good. What do you think will change in the future?

Citations:

• https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_change.html

• https://theculturetrip.com/europe/articles/10-english-words-that-have-completely-changed-meaning/

• https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/words-literally-changed-meaning-through-2173079

• https://pgacc.news/741605/feature/old-slang-vs-new-slang/