Semantic change

Evolution of a word's meaning

Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. In diachronic (or historical) linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.

Awful – Literally "full of awe", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely bad". Awesome – Literally "awe inducing", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely good". Terrible – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly bad. Terrific – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly good. Nice – Originally meant "foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless". from Old French nice (12c.) meaning "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish", from Latin nescius ("ignorant or unaware"). Literally "not knowing", from ne "not" (from PIE root *ne "not") + stem of scire "to know" (compare with science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj". [Weekley] from "timid, faint hearted" (pre 1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c. ); to "dainty, delicate" (c. 1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830). Naïf or Naïve – Initially meant "natural, primitive, or native" From French naïf, literally "native". The masculine form of the French word, but used in English without reference to gender. As a noun, "natural, artless, naive person", first attested 1893, from French, where Old French naif also meant "native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool". Demagogue – Originally meant "a popular leader". It is from the Greek dēmagōgós "leader of the people", from dēmos "people" + agōgós "leading, guiding". Now the word has strong connotations of a politician who panders to emotions and prejudice. Egregious – Originally described something that was remarkably good (as in Theorema Egregium). The word is from the Latin egregius "illustrious, select", literally, "standing out from the flock", which is from ex—"out of" + greg—(grex) "flock". Now it means something that is remarkably bad or flagrant. Gay – Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy", it also came to mean "happy"; it acquired connotations of immorality as early as 1637, either sexual e. g., gay woman "prostitute", gay man "womaniser", gay house "brothel", or otherwise, e. g., gay dog "over indulgent man" and gay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In the United States by 1897 the expression gay cat referred to a hobo, especially a younger hobo in the company of an older one; by 1935, it was used in prison slang for a homosexual boy; and by 1951, and clipped to gay, referred to homosexuals. George Chauncey, in his book Gay New York, would put this shift as early as the late 19th century among a certain "in crowd", knowledgeable of gay night life. In the modern day, it is most often used to refer to homosexuals, at first among themselves and then in society at large, with a neutral connotation; or as a derogatory synonym for "silly", "dumb", or "boring". Guy – Guy Fawkes was the alleged leader of a plot to blow up the English Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The day was made a holiday, Guy Fawkes Day, commemorated by parading and burning a ragged manikin of Fawkes, known as a Guy. This led to the use of the word guy as a term for any "person of grotesque appearance" and then by the late 1800s—especially in the United States—for "any man", as in, e. g., "Some guy called for you". Over the 20th century, guy has replaced fellow in the U. S., and, under the influence of American popular culture, has been gradually replacing fellow, bloke, chap and other such words throughout the rest of the English speaking world. In the plural, it can refer to a mixture of genders (e. g., "Come on, you guys!" could be directed to a group of mixed gender instead of only men).

A number of classification schemes have been suggested for semantic change. Recent overviews have been presented by Blank and Semantic change has attracted academic discussions since ancient times, although the first major works emerged in the 19th century with , , and Studies beyond the analysis of single words have been started with the word field analyses of , who claimed that every semantic change of a word would also affect all other words in a lexical field. His approach was later refined by introduced Generative semantics. More recent works including pragmatic and cognitive theories are those in , Dirk Geeraerts, and
A chronological list of typologies is presented below. Today, the most currently used typologies are those by and .

A specific case of semantic change is reappropriation, a cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group, for example like with the word queer. Other related processes include pejoration and amelioration.

Apart from many individual studies, etymological dictionaries are prominent reference books for finding out about semantic changes. A recent survey lists practical tools and online systems for investigating semantic change of words over time. WordEvolutionStudy is an academic platform that takes arbitrary words as input to generate summary views of their evolution based on Google Books ngram dataset and the Corpus of Historical American English.