How long has awesome been around

The word has continued to broaden itself, and now can be found used as a general purpose exclamation of approval. In doing so, it is following in the footsteps of another very similar word: awful. Awful had a very similar meaning as awesome for much of our history: inspiring dread. If you are one of the people who use awesome to refer to something that is merely pleasing, and someone tells you that your language is awful, you can take pride in the fact that you have inspired in them extreme feelings of dread and terror.

The answer is quickly gotten from google search and has to do "awe" historically having a meaning closer to "fear" and "dread", but I'm a bit too lazy to write it up properly.

Incidentally, this reminds me of "priceless" vs. Neither bearing an outsourced opinion nor a linguist of any definition, MitchSchwartz, but seems to me that "priceless" deals with the cost of a thing, i. Even though that thing has no cost, it definitely has worth. Price and worth are surely not the same thing?

One is commodity value and the other is personal value at least if used without additional context? Question compares dissimilar suffixes with similar meaning and same base, you compare same suffixes and meaning with different base. What is the reminder? MitchSchwartz The irony of your comment is that StackOverflow most often ends up at the top of those Google results soon after the question is asked.

In fact, that is exactly how I arrived at this page. It seems like there are some deriver forms that oppose the rule and logic. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. All of this data came from the OED. Improve this answer. Kosmonaut Kosmonaut 49k 10 10 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. But now "awesome" is used so much it could just mean nice We do still say something is awfully good, which presumably heralds back to the older, less negative meaning.

Jimi Oke Jimi Oke Jasper, that's awfully nice of you to say : — Jimi Oke. Jasper Jimi -- you guys are awful! I would advise any entrepreneur who aspires to be taken more seriously to eliminate this ubiquitous word from his or her vocabulary.

I just got back from Inc. Lots of useful, enjoyable, wonderful stuff there, as always, but I was stunned by how almost every speech by every presenter and almost every overheard or casual conversation was peppered with the word awesome.

It was inescapable, like verbal kudzu choking out the variegated richness of the English language--so omnipresent it seemed like an acceptable substitute for just about any word. Fact: People in Shakespeare's time had working vocabularies of around 54, words. They actually talked like characters in Shakespeare's plays. The working vocabulary of the average American is 3, words and, I suspect, declining. So, is "awesomeness" the beginning of the end for nuanced, accurate business communication?

Does it render exact words irrelevant, mute, and dead? Does the practicing and practical entrepreneur even need words and vocabulary to be awesome? Both modifiers are cliched exaggerations: the first really means "dread-inspiring", the second implies a miracle has taken place. The fact that you can apply either to a flapjack recipe indicates we've long drained them of impact.

Both have been around for a long time, but we use up cliches faster these days. We need new ones all the time. There is hope for "marvellous" yet. My American mother used it exclusively as a sarcastic term, usually when a second bad thing happened while something else was still in the process of going wrong.