we can be pretty sure he wasn’t talking about his Facebook page. Instead, Fuller used the word to mean something like “estranged” or “fallen out,” a straightforward literal meaning that ...

Words sometimes have two meanings, as Led Zeppelin sang in “Stairway to Heaven.” And indeed they often do. Especially, words can acquire new meanings and lose old ones. For example, ...

Everyday objects and people have an emotional meaning. A wool sock might have an emotional value if it was the last thing grandmother knitted before her death. The same applies to words.

We know that words change all the time and over time, a process language experts describe as “semantic shift,” semantics being the field of language concerned with meaning. Even if we may not ...

"Words have changed their meaning ever since the first word was ... In 1920s America through the pages of Variety magazine, it meant an immoral woman or “floozie”. Then it reappeared in ...

BABIES COME into the world seeking out comfort, so their first word is often “mama ... people listen out for “oki” and “aiata”, meaning “I’m getting out of here” and “stop ...

In fact, very few interesting words are quite so stable. As they are used, their meanings drift. Furthermore, they need not remain true to their etymological roots, a belief known to linguists as ...