Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
In addition to words of recent origin, there are words whose meaning has completely changed over the years. For example, the phrase "by and by" is most often defined as an unspecified, future time and place, but in 1611, when the King James Version of the Bible was published, it meant "immediately."
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As indeed, also happened to the word "presently", which originally meant "now" (ie "at the present time"), but now means "in a while".
The word which has changed its meaning most often over the course of the centuries is perhaps the word "nice", which originally (in the 12th century) meant "foolish" or "ignorant", had acquired the meaning of "fussy" by the 14th c, "precise" or "careful" by the 16th (which we still retain in phrases like "a nice distinction"), "agreeable" by 1769, and "kind" by 1830. It has so many meanings that the OED says "In many examples from the 16th and 17th centuries it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken".