"A possible example ofameliorationduring ME [Middle English] might be, depending on one's viewpoint, the worddizzy. In OE [Old English] it meant 'foolish,' a meaning that survives marginally in such expressions asa dizzy blonde; but by ME its primary meaning was 'suffering from vertigo.'"...
In English grammar, a word class is a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution. The term"word class" is similar to the more traditional term,part of speech. It is also variously calledgrammatical category, lexical category, and syntactic...
"Towards the end of the 19th century, rhetoric fell into disrepute and was no longer taught in the various educational institutions. The word 'rhetoric' received apejorativemeaning, suggesting the use of underhanded tricks, fraud, and deceit, or the stringing together of hollow words, hackneyed e...
Insemanticsandhistorical linguistics, semantic change refers to any change in the meaning(s) of a word over the course of time. Also called semantic shift, lexical change, and semantic progression. Common types of semantic change includeamelioration,pejoration,broadening,semantic narrowing,bleaching, m...
(chill + relax), bromance (brother + romance), mockumentary (mock + documentary), and finally, ginormous (gigantic + enormous), which made the cut with the keepers of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989, albeit as “slang” (although Merriam-Webster's counts the relatively new open-class...