If someone called you "awful" today, you'd probably be offended. But travel back a few hundred years and that same word would have been high praise.
Awful has one of the more dramatic reversals in the English language. It began as something genuinely admiring and ended up as something quite negative in everyday use.
"The word 'awful' traces back to the Old English root ege, meaning dread, reverence or profound respect," said Sophie Vignoles, a linguist and head of learning content at a language learning company. "It originally meant something that filled you with awe, describing anything that inspired wonder or terror, often tied to the power of nature, and it was a compliment. A mountain range or a storm could be called awful, and that was high praise."
The word can be traced back to a ninth-century text, and the Oxford English Dictionary has many examples of "awful" from the following centuries — generally meaning things like "inspiring respect, mixed with wonder or reverential fear."
So how did it evolve to mean something simply negative?
"The shift happened gradually through the 19th century," Vignoles said. "Awe itself is a mixed emotion. It carries wonder but also fear and sometimes a sense of insignificance, and over time, English speakers leaned into the fearful side rather than the reverent one. Awful stopped meaning inspiring and started meaning overwhelming in a bad way."
Even before that, some writers worried the word was being used too casually. Welsh writer Hester Lynch Piozzi asserted in 1794 that the word should "be used with caution and a due sense of its importance."
Over the next century, the word came into its more modern meaning of unpleasant, not desirable or just very bad.
This kind of drift, where a word sheds one meaning and picks up another, is known as semantic shift. Like "nice," which shifted from something negative to something positive, awful completely reversed course — only in the opposite direction.
Awful's close cousin "awesome" makes the reversal even more striking. Awful actually predates awesome by centuries, though the two had similar meanings for a stretch. As both words weakened over time, awesome shifted to a more positive connotation of "good" or "cool" while awful came to mean "very bad."
"Terrific" and "terrible" tell a similar story. They come from the same Latin root and once shared the same basic meaning: inspiring terror or dread. Today, terrible has kept that negative sense while terrific has traveled so far in the opposite direction that it's essentially a synonym for wonderful.
"It shows that meaning is never fixed. It is negotiated by whoever is using the word at the time," Vignoles said.
So the next time something is so bad it's almost impressive, you should feel comfortable calling it awful. But if you find something so good it inspires awe, you should probably opt for a different word so as not to offend.