Words and idioms that reversed meaning: a reference list with dates

What counts as a reversal

Meanings drift constantly, but a reversal is the most dramatic kind of drift: a word that ends up meaning something close to the opposite of where it began. Sometimes the flip is gradual and one-way, as when a term of praise curdles into an insult; sometimes it is a full about-turn; and in a few cases a word has swung one way and then partly back, leaving speakers arguing about which sense is ‘correct’. Because these are the words that most often trip up readers of old texts — and most often attract invented backstories — they are worth collecting with their approximate dates attached. The dates below mark the earliest reasonably secure evidence for each shift, drawn from the standard etymological references; as always, a first record marks the earliest surviving written trace, not necessarily the first time anyone spoke the word that way.

A reference list

Two entries on the list, silly and nice, are treated more fully in our guide to how meanings drift, since they are the standard examples of pejoration and amelioration. The rest reward a closer look, because several are surrounded by half-truths.

A reversal, it should be said, is really just the most extreme form of the broadening, narrowing, amelioration and pejoration that act on words all the time. What sets these cases apart is the sheer distance travelled: the modern sense is not merely different from the old one but roughly contrary to it. That is why they matter out of proportion to their number. A word that has broadened a little will still make rough sense in an old text; a word that has reversed will actively mislead, telling a modern reader the opposite of what the writer meant. The list is a defensive tool as much as a curiosity — a short catalogue of the traps most likely to spring shut on the unwary.

Notes on the trickier cases

Egregious is the cleanest reversal in the language. It comes from Latin egregius, literally ‘out of the flock’ (ex grege), and entered English in the 1530s meaning ‘distinguished, eminent’. Within a generation it was also being used for things remarkable in a bad way, apparently through ironic use — calling a scoundrel ‘egregious’ the way we might call one ‘a fine specimen’. The disapproving sense hardened until it drove out the compliment entirely, and today an ‘egregious error’ is a shockingly bad one, the exact opposite of the original praise.

Bully travelled just as far. In the 1530s it was a term of endearment, ‘sweetheart’, applied to either sex and probably borrowed from Dutch boel, ‘lover’. It slid through ‘fine fellow’ and ‘blusterer’ to reach ‘one who harasses the weak’ by the 1680s. A faint fossil of the warm old sense survives in the exclamation ‘bully for you!’, which still means ‘good for you’ — a small pocket of praise left behind by a word that otherwise turned menacing.

Prestige is a rare case of a word climbing out of disrepute. It derives from Latin praestigium, ‘a delusion, an illusion’, related to a conjuror’s tricks, and in the 1650s it meant exactly that: a deception. Only in the nineteenth century did it acquire, first, the sense of a dazzling but possibly hollow reputation, and then the wholly positive ‘high standing’ we mean today. The magician’s flourish called ‘the prestige’ preserves the older, trickster sense.

Restive is the reversal most likely to catch out a careful reader of older prose. It came from French in the fifteenth century describing a horse that refused to move — stubborn, balky, standing still — and for centuries it meant inert or immovable. In the later nineteenth century the associated image shifted from the refusal itself to the fidgeting and skittishness that went with it, and ‘restive’ came to mean restless and impatient, nearly the opposite of ‘unmoving’.

Fulsome shows that reversals need not be permanent. It began around 1200 meaning ‘abundant, full’, soured by the 1600s into ‘excessive, cloying, offensive to good taste’, and has in the last century drifted back toward ‘abundant’ and ‘generous’ — so that ‘fulsome praise’ now means opposite things to different readers, which is exactly why careful writers use it warily.

Manufacture and counterfeit show how a word’s literal core can invert without anyone noticing. ‘Manufacture’ is built from Latin roots meaning ‘made by hand’ (manu + facere), yet it now denotes precisely the opposite — making by machine, at scale — because the word stayed put while the practice it named was mechanised. ‘Counterfeit’ once meant simply a ‘counter-making’, a legitimate copy or likeness, before it narrowed and darkened into ‘forged, fraudulent’. In both, the reversal is not of mood but of the literal fact the word asserts.

A few more members of the club deserve a mention. Notorious once meant merely ‘well known’ and has narrowed to ‘known for something bad’, so that to call a scholar notorious is now an insult where once it was neutral. Spinster began as an honest occupational term for a woman who spins — so standard that it became the legal designation for an unmarried woman on documents — before hardening into a slur for a woman thought to have been left ‘on the shelf’. Terrific and terrible, as noted in our companion guide, both descend from Latin terror and once shared the sense ‘causing dread’, but ‘terrific’ ameliorated into praise while ‘terrible’ stayed damning — the same root splitting into opposites. And awful, once ‘full of awe’ and therefore a word of reverence (‘the awful majesty of God’), has sunk to mean simply ‘very bad’. None of these is a contronym; each is a genuine one-way journey that happens to have ended near the antonym of its start.

Reversals versus contronyms

It is worth distinguishing a true historical reversal, where a word has changed sense over time, from a contronym (or ‘Janus word’), which carries opposite senses simultaneously. ‘Sanction’ can mean both to permit and to penalise; ‘cleave’ means both to split apart and to cling together (these are in fact two different old verbs that fell together in spelling); ‘dust’ can mean to remove fine particles or to apply them; ‘oversight’ can mean careful supervision or a careless omission. These are not words that flipped and left the old sense behind; they are words holding two contrary meanings at the same time, disambiguated only by context. A reference list of reversals should keep the two categories apart, because the honest account of a contronym is ‘both senses are current’, not ‘the meaning changed’.

A word about ‘nimrod’

One reversal deserves a cautionary note because its popular history may itself be folklore. Nimrod is a biblical figure, ‘a mighty hunter before the Lord’ (Genesis 10), and in modern American slang it means a fool. The much-repeated explanation is that Bugs Bunny sarcastically called the hapless hunter Elmer Fudd a ‘nimrod’, children missed the irony, and the insult stuck. It is a good story and the cartoon usage is real, but etymologists have found the ‘fool’ sense in print in ways that complicate a tidy single-source origin. It is safest to say the word reversed during the twentieth century and that the Bugs Bunny account, while plausible and popular, is not proven to be the whole cause.

Why reversals happen

Look across the list and the same handful of engines keep appearing. Irony flips praise into blame, as with ‘egregious’ and, probably, ‘nimrod’. Euphemism and social contempt drag warm words downward, as with ‘bully’. A shift of focus within a single scene turns a meaning inside out, as when ‘restive’ moved from the horse’s refusal to its fidgeting. Technology quietly rewrites a word’s literal core, as when ‘manufacture’ stopped meaning ‘by hand’ at the very moment machines took over the making. The lesson for anyone tracing a phrase is blunt: never assume a word in an old text means what it means now. Check the date, check the period sense, and be especially suspicious of any saying that seems to contain a contradiction — the contradiction is usually the trace of a reversal, not a puzzle to be solved with a colourful anecdote.