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,” Sophie Vignoles, a linguist and head of learning content at the language learning app Babbel, told HuffPost. “That origin shows in its early use. It originally meant something that filled you with awe, describing anything that inspired wonder or terror, often tied to the power of God or nature, and it was a compliment. A mountain range or a storm could be called awful, and that was high praise.”
The word awful goes back to Old English, with experts pointing to a ninth-century citation attributed to Alfred the Great. The Oxford English Dictionary has many examples of “awful” in texts from the subsequent centuries – generally meaning things like “inspiring respect, mixed with wonder or reverential fear.”
Basically, awful was the sort of word people reached for when ordinary language failed to describe things so powerful, majestic and grand that they inspired deep reverence – like the divine.
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.”
For a long time, awful captured the complexity of awe and its connection to the sacred and sublime. But language tends to simplify over time, and people gradually started emphasising the dread over the wonder. Eventually “awful” became a weaker, more casual word.
The slide was gradual enough that it drew complaints along the way. Welsh writer Hester Lynch Piozzi asserted in 1794 that the word should “be used with caution and a due sense of its importance”.
“I have heard even well-bred ladies now and then attribute that term too lightly in their common conversation, connecting it with substances beneath its dignity,” she wrote.
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, and it’s one of the most reliable patterns in the history of any language. Just as “nice” shifted from something negative to something positive, awful also completely reversed course – but in the opposite direction of positive to negative.
Thus, a word that once described the sublime now describes the merely terrible. Awful’s close cousin “awesome” makes the reversal even more striking.
Interestingly, the word awful actually predates awesome by centuries, though the two had similar meanings for a stretch. As both words weakened in meaning over time, awesome shifted to a more positive connotation of “good” or “cool” while awful came to mean “very bad.”
“Awesome comes from the exact same root but took the opposite path, which shows how unpredictable this kind of drift can be,” Vignoles noted.
The awful/awesome split isn’t even unique within English. “Terrific” and “terrible” 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. Thus we have another pair of sibling words that started in the same place and ended up miles apart.
“It shows that meaning is never fixed. It is negotiated by whoever is using the word at the time,” Vignoles said, pointing to Babbel’s research on the way American English has evolved in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary this year.
“Awful is a useful reminder that English often trades one meaning for another,” she added. “This kind of reversal is not unique to English either. In Russian, the word grozny once carried a sense of majesty and awe-inspiring power. Ivan Grozny, usually translated into English as Ivan the Terrible, was not originally meant as a purely negative title. Over time, the word narrowed toward its harsher, more fearsome sense, much like awful did in English.”
So, the next time something is so bad it’s almost impressive, you should feel comfortable calling it awful, in keeping with the word’s original meaning. But if you find something so good it inspires awe, you should probably opt for a different word so as not to offend.
