Plenty of everyday English words have changed meaning over time, and a few have turned right round. Nice meant foolish or ignorant for three centuries, silly once meant worthy or holy, awful meant terrifying or awe-inspiring, a girl could be a boy, and meat was any food at all. Linguists call this semantic change.
EdCitation publishes this guide. Every sense and date below comes from a dictionary page we read on 27 September 2026: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) where its entry was open to read, Merriam-Webster, and Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary. Where they give different dates, we show both.
If you are writing about old texts or the history of English, EdCitation's free Find sources searches about 300 million published works for the scholarship, and Cite a source builds each reference from the publisher's record. The last section shows both at work on "semantic change".
Which English words changed meaning over time?
Thirteen well-known cases are in the table. Dates are the earliest evidence the named dictionary gives, so they record when a sense was first written down, not when people began to say it. In the OED's dates, c means about and a means before.
| Word | Earlier meaning | When | Now | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nice | foolish, silly, simple; ignorant | c1300 to 1617 | pleasant, agreeable (from 1747); kind (from 1830) | OED |
| silly | worthy, good; pious, holy | a1450 to 1825 | foolish (from c1555) | OED |
| awful | inspiring fear (c1175); inspiring reverence (a1400) | from the 12th century | disagreeable, bad (from 1781) | OED |
| girl | a child or young person of either sex | from c1300, now rare | a female child or young woman | OED |
| meat | food of any kind | Old English, now archaic | animal flesh as food (from a1325) | OED |
| deer | any animal, especially a four-footed one | Old English to 1481 | the deer family (from c1275) | OED |
| gay | merry; bright, lively | 13th century | attracted to people of one's own sex | Merriam-Webster, Etymonline |
| decimate | kill one soldier in ten, chosen by lot | 1591 (OED), 1660 (Merriam-Webster) | reduce drastically; badly damage | Merriam-Webster, OED |
| literally | in a literal sense | c1429 (OED), 1530s (Etymonline) | also "in effect, virtually" (evidence from 1769) | Merriam-Webster |
| egregious | distinguished, excellent | about 1550 | glaringly bad | Merriam-Webster, Etymonline |
| naughty | needy; wicked | late 14th century | badly behaved, mostly of children (from the 1630s) | Etymonline |
| bully | sweetheart | about 1548 | someone who torments weaker people (from the 1680s) | Merriam-Webster, Etymonline |
| clue | a ball of thread (spelled clew) | Old English | a fact that helps solve a problem (1605 in the OED) | OED, Etymonline |
The OED entries for decimate, literally, egregious, naughty and bully sit behind a subscription, so for those we read only the OED's free factsheet with its earliest date; the senses come from Merriam-Webster and Etymonline.
What did nice, silly and awful originally mean?
All three once meant something close to the opposite of today's sense, and each travelled there through several steps.
Nice: from foolish to pleasant
Nice came into English from Old French, from Latin nescius, "not knowing". The OED's first sense, "foolish, silly, simple; ignorant", runs from about 1300 to 1617. On the way it also meant wanton, showy, shy, fussy, trivial and precise, which is why we still speak of a nice distinction. The pleasant sense, "agreeable, pleasant, satisfactory", has OED evidence from 1747, and "kind or considerate" from 1830 (Oxford University Press, n.d.-g).
The OED notes that this path from "foolish" to "pleasing" has no parallel in Latin or the Romance languages, and that its precise course is unclear. Etymonline dates "agreeable, delightful" to 1769 (Harper, n.d.); the OED's revised entry has found earlier evidence, which is how these dates move.
Silly: from blessed to foolish
Silly began as Old English sǣlig, glossed "lucky, blessed" by Anderson et al. (2022). The OED's earliest sense of the modern spelling is "worthy, good; also pious, holy", from before 1450 to 1825. It then meant pitiable, weak, simple and humble before "lacking in judgement or common sense" appears in about 1555 (Oxford University Press, n.d.-h). Etymonline dates the foolish sense to the 1570s.
Awful: from full of awe to very bad
Awful was built from awe and -ful. Its oldest OED sense, "that inspires or instils fear, terror, or dread", dates from about 1175, and "arousing or inspiring reverential respect" from before 1400. "Disagreeable, objectionable; bad" follows in 1781, and the intensifier in an awful lot in 1818 (Oxford University Press, n.d.-a). Merriam-Webster's usage guide adds that some people object to the senses with no link to awe, yet those senses were in speech and casual writing by the late eighteenth century (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-a).
Which words have reversed their meanings?
Words whose meanings have reversed include nice and silly, which swapped good and bad in opposite directions, and at least four more moved a long way.
- Egregious comes from Latin egregius, "out of the herd", and entered English around 1550 meaning distinguished. Merriam-Webster says it gained the sense "conspicuously bad", possibly through ironic use (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-e); Etymonline also calls the disapproving sense originally ironic.
- Bully first meant "sweetheart", probably from Dutch boel, "lover". It then meant a good fellow, then a blusterer, and now a person who intimidates the weak (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-b). The harasser sense dates from the 1680s, and bully for you, from 1864, keeps the old approval (Harper, n.d.).
- Naughty, from naught, "nothing", meant needy and also evil or immoral in the late fourteenth century; the milder sense of a misbehaving child is from the 1630s (Harper, n.d.).
- Literally kept its first sense and gained a second one that some readers hear as the opposite: "in effect: virtually" (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-c).
Are decimate and literally being misused?
Both uses are in the dictionaries and both are centuries old; whether to use them is a matter of style. Merriam-Webster defines decimate first as the Roman punishment of killing every tenth soldier chosen by lot, then as "to reduce drastically especially in number". It says the broad sense took only a few decades to arrive and has been used steadily since the seventeenth century (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-d). The dictionaries disagree on the first date: 1591 in the OED's factsheet, from Henry Savile's translation (Oxford University Press, n.d.-c); 1660 in Merriam-Webster; about 1600 in Etymonline.
For literally, Merriam-Webster (n.d.-c) finds the hyperbolic use in evidence from 1769 and points out that its 1909 unabridged dictionary already said the word was "often used hyperbolically". It quotes the OED's own sense, dated September 2011, for use in "the strongest admissible sense". Etymonline dates the figurative use to the late seventeenth century. Merriam-Webster notes that the dictionaries it quotes all warn this sense is widely frowned upon, so in a formal essay the plain sense is the safe one.
What are the kinds of semantic change?
Linguists sort changes in meaning by what happens to the range of a word and to its tone. The definitions here are those of the open textbook Essentials of Linguistics (Anderson et al., 2022), which also notes that old and new senses usually live side by side for a time, as with literally.
| Kind | What happens | The textbook's examples | Our examples, classified by us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadening (widening) | A specific meaning becomes a general one | arrive: once to reach land after a sea voyage | decimate |
| Narrowing (specialisation) | A general meaning becomes a specific one | deer, meat, starve ("to die") | girl |
| Amelioration (elevation) | A meaning becomes more positive, even a little | eager (once "angry, acidic"), fantastic, smart | nice, naughty |
| Pejoration (degeneration) | A meaning becomes more negative | silly, knave (once any boy), frame | awful, bully, egregious |
The textbook also names metaphor and metonymy, shifts to a meaning outside the old one. Clue is one: Etymonline traces it to the ball of thread Ariadne gave Theseus to find his way out of the Labyrinth, and the OED dates the figurative sense to 1605 (Oxford University Press, n.d.-b). Naughty counts as amelioration because the textbook includes a change "from negative to less negative". The OED's dates for deer, meat and girl show narrowing in slow motion: each old sense lived on for centuries beside the new one (Oxford University Press, n.d.-d, n.d.-e, n.d.-f).
Where does gay fit?
We describe it only as the dictionaries do. Merriam-Webster's first sense of gay is now "of, relating to, or characterized by sexual or romantic attraction to people of one's same sex", with "merry" and "bright, lively" listed after it; its first known use, in the "bright, lively" sense, is the thirteenth century (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-f). Etymonline finds the current sense appearing in psychological writing in the late 1940s. Both dictionaries record other senses along the way, which is why a nineteenth-century "gay" usually needs checking.
How do you read a changed word in an older source for an essay?
Treat any common word in a text before about 1800 as possibly carrying an older sense, and check it in a dictionary that dates its senses. The OED's first edition said of nice that in many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples "it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it" (Oxford University Press, n.d.-g). Shakespeare shows the trap: in the 1597 quarto of Romeo and Juliet, "The letters were not nice, but of great weight" uses the OED's obsolete sense "unimportant, trivial".
- Note the date of the text, and of the edition you read. A modern edition may gloss hard words for you; follow our guide to sourcing a history for choosing one.
- Look up any word that reads oddly in the OED (through your library if the entry is locked) or in Etymonline, and pick the sense whose dates cover your text.
- Read the dated quotations. A sense in use in your writer's decade, by writers like yours, is the likely one.
- Say which sense you mean in your essay, and cite the dictionary entry. Our guide to the OED and its volunteers shows how to cite an OED entry in APA 7.
- Find the scholarship on the word or the text in EdCitation's Find sources, and build each reference in Cite a source.
- Check the finished list in Verify references, free, which marks each entry verified, "check this" or not found and flags retracted papers.
Who decides that a new sense is correct is a question of its own, answered in who decides what is correct English; the periods these words passed through are in a short history of English.
How do you find research on semantic change?
Search the scholarship by its own term, "semantic change", then build each reference from its record. EdCitation is the best tool for that second step, because every reference it gives is looked up in the publisher's record and never written: on a subject where the dictionaries themselves revise their dates, a reference taken from the record is the one you can trust.
We ran EdCitation's Find sources on "semantic change" on 27 September 2026. It returned 1,220,085 results, provider OpenAlex, led by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Richard B. Dasher's Regularity in Semantic Change (2001, cited by 1,742), a 2024 chapter of the same name, and Traugott's 1989 article in Language (cited by 1,790). With Most cited, the same total came back with the 1989 article first. The phrase also means something in computer vision: the sixth result was on "semantic change detection" in images. Adding the kinds of change, "semantic change pejoration amelioration", cut the list to 358, with Traugott's 2006 encyclopedia entry "Semantic Change: Bleaching, Strengthening, Narrowing, Extension" second.
We gave the DOI of the 1989 article to Cite a source, free, and it returned this APA 7 entry from Crossref's record, with the in-text citation (Traugott, 1989):
Traugott, E. C. (1989). On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language, 65(1), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/414841
The title is in sentence case, as APA asks, with English keeping its capital. Cite a source builds the same reference in MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver, and screens the source for retraction. For the books, EdCitation's Library searches a catalogue of textbooks and scholarly books by discipline, kind, language and year; with Max, at $24 a month, it opens more than 5 million books to read or borrow (pricing). None of these tools writes any part of your essay: the argument about what a word meant is yours, and EdCitation makes sure the sources under it are real.
Quick questions
What did nice originally mean?
Foolish, silly or ignorant. The OED dates that sense from about 1300 to 1617, and the pleasant sense from 1747.
What was the original meaning of awful?
Inspiring fear or dread, from about 1175, and inspiring reverence, from before 1400. The OED dates "bad, disagreeable" from 1781.
Is it wrong to use decimate to mean destroy?
Merriam-Webster does not call it wrong: it says the broad sense has been used steadily since the seventeenth century. Some readers still object, so in formal writing say exactly what you mean.
Can EdCitation find sources on the history of a word?
Yes. EdCitation's free Find sources searches about 300 million published works; searching "semantic change" returned 1,220,085 results, and Cite a source builds the reference from each DOI.
References
- Anderson, C., Bjorkman, B., Denis, D., Doner, J., Grant, M., Sanders, N., & Taniguchi, A. (2022). 14.6 Semantic change. In Essentials of linguistics (2nd ed.). eCampusOntario. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics2/chapter/14-6-semantic-change/
- Harper, D. (n.d.). Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.etymonline.com/
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-a). Awful. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awful
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-b). Bully. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bully
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-c). Did we change the definition of "literally"? Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-d). Decimate. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-e). Egregious. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/egregious
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-f). Gay. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gay
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-a). Awful, adj. & adv. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1036045898
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-b). Clue, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9440654257
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-c). Decimate, v. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7421650572
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-d). Deer, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2221409591
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-e). Girl, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7744946133
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-f). Meat, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8130407344
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-g). Nice, adj. & adv. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8029099313
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-h). Silly, adj., n., & adv. In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved September 27, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4265967977
- Traugott, E. C. (1989). On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language, 65(1), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/414841