40 Common Words That Used To Have Completely Different Meanings

After her morning jog past the rival, the now-nervous queen sat on an artificial bench to listen to the jargon. Don’t worry, you aren’t going mad — that sentence is gibberish today. But back when many of those words had different meanings, it would’ve made sense. And some of the terms we use nowadays have even stranger origins.

40. Silly

Let’s start off with a silly one — literally. Of course, the word “silly” as we know it means acting foolish or ridiculous. But its original old English meaning was less judgmental. It was actually once an adjective referring to someone who was happy, before this description fell out of common use. Silly, really.

39. Naughty

If someone’s being “naughty,” they’re misbehaving in some way. For example, a troublesome child can be naughty, but so can a mischievous adult. The observant among you may have guessed it’s derived from the term “naught,” though, which means “nothing.” And that’s exactly what it meant in the 1300s: someone who was poor.

38. Nice

Should you ever time travel back to the 1300s — unlikely, but never say never — don’t call anyone “nice.” Sure, to us it means someone who’s kind and amicable. Yet in ye olden days, it was rooted in a French term describing something or someone as foolish. Which, ironically, isn’t very nice.

37. Queen

Slang terms aside, the word “queen” is mostly used to describe a female member of the monarchy. Yet what if we were to tell you that at one point every woman was a queen in her own right? You see, when the word was first coined it simply meant a female, rather than one specifically married to a king.