An “awful” Roman Legion
18 April 2025
Words often change their meaning over the years and centuries, and awesome and awful are two good examples. Their current meanings are quite different from when they were originally coined.
When I typed awesome into the search box* on urbandictionary.com, the first definition that popped up, authored by someone who goes by the apt screenname of Spleenvent, is:
Something Americans use to describe everything.
[* = Your results may vary. This is what I got when I searched for the word on 21 March 2025.]
And a few definitions down I found this:
A “sticking plaster” word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabularies. It is one of the three words which make up most American sentances [sic].
The American vocabulary consists of just three words: Omygod, awesome and shit.
Both these definitions date to 2006, and presumably both are from Britons. In addition to demonstrating the validity of McKean’s Law, which states that any criticism of another’s language will itself contain at least one error, these definitions are pretty good, if highly informal, descriptions of how the word is often used today.
This sense is a relatively recent development, although from the perspective of today’s teens it is a thoroughly decrepit and creaky one. The earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as “a general term of approval: excellent, fantastic, great,” is from 1979, found in linguist Connie Eble’s collection of University of North Carolina student slang.
Before that, the word existed with a somewhat milder meaning of remarkable or prodigious. This use of awesome dates to at least 1838 in a negative context and to 1916 in a positive one.
In contrast, awesome’s original meaning, which is recorded as early as 1598, is quite literal: something that inspires awe or reverence.
Similarly, awful originally meant causing terror or dread, or frightening, inspiring reverential fear—God could be awful. The word did not simply mean very bad.
Awful is a much older word, dating back to Old English, the language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The following is from the late ninth-century translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy into Old English, a translation that is generally attributed to King Alfred the Great:
[Cicero] cyðde on sumre his boca ðæt þa get Romane nama ne come ofer þa muntas þe we hatað Caucaseas, ne þa Sciððeas þe on oðre healfe þara munta bugiað furðum þære burge naman ne þæs folces ne geheordon, ac þa he com ærest to Parððum and wæs þær swiðe niew. Ac he wes þeah þærymbutan manegum folce swiðe egefull.
([Cicero] said in one of his books that at the time the name of the Romans had not yet come over the mountains that we call the Caucasus, nor had the Scythians who live on the other side of the mountains even heard of the name of the city or the people, but then it came first to Parthia and was very new there. But it was nevertheless very awful to many folk thereabouts.)
For awful in this passage, we can read fearsome or frightening.
But today, awful simply means bad. The OED has a May 1781 citation found in a letter by Methodist evangelist Joanna Turner to her husband that the dictionary classifies in this newer sense, presumably because it is describing the weather. But it is actually an example of the older sense of inspiring fear; the weather is inspiring fear in her:
I hope you were carried home safe! I felt for you all the afternoon you left me; besides pangs of the tenderest affection at parting! The awful weather was a great affliction; thinking how you were exposed.
Instead, the modern sense of awful meaning very bad dates to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The earliest citation of this sense in the Oxford English Dictionary is by Thomas Green Fessenden (1771-1837), a journalist, satirical poet, and early American political pundit. (Fessenden also wrote extensively about farming and gardening. Go figure.) In 1809, he penned a sentiment that is very familiar to us today:
I fear our great, and far-famed nation,
Is in an awful situation;
That dame Columbia, free and brave,
Has one foot fairly in her grave;
Yes, she is gasping for her breath,
While certain journeymen of death,
At Washington have been at work,
To send her packing in a jerk,
And her unburied corpse expose
To glut the maws of Gallick crows!
Evidently the meaning of words changes faster than the nature of political commentary.
Sources:
Fessenden, Thomas G. [Peter Pepper-Box, pseud.] Pills, Poetical, Political, and Philosophical. Philadelphia, 1809, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.
Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine, eds. The Old English Boethius, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, Chapter 18. 1:280.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. awesome, adj., adv., & intj., awful, adj. & adv.
Turner, Joanna. Letter to her husband Thomas (May 1781). In Mary Wells. Triumph of Faith Over the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Bristol: T. Mills, 1787, 174. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Urbandictionary.com, s.v. awesome. Accessed 21 March 2025.
Image credit: Barosaurus Lentus, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
