Word of the Week – Terrible & Terrific

It doesn’t take more than looking at the words terrible and terrific to guess that they share a root. They both come to us from the Greek treëin, which means “to tremble, be afraid.” Terrible is another of those words with its roots in the oldest language, and it made its way English, via Old French, which in turn came from Latin, around the year 1400.

By the 1590s, terrible was used for anything that evoked feelings of dread, which led to the meaning of “violently severe.” By the 1700s, it had weakened a bit to anything “great or severe,” which is when people began to say someone was, for instance, a “terrible bore.” By 1913, it could just mean “very bad, extremely incompetent.”

So what about terrific? This one is newer, first used by Milton in the 1660s. It traces from those same roots, originally meaning “Frightening, causing terror.” It maintained its meaning until about 1809, when it softened to “very great, severe, excessive,” like if you had “a terrific headache.” But it is curious when that “very great” flips the whole meaning of the word and comes to mean something was “very great, excellent,” which happened around 1888.

I’m always so intrigued when a word completely reverses its meaning like that!