The Changing Meaning of Egregious
Hello,
This week’s word is egregious (pronunciation here), mostly because it’s a word I enjoy using, partly because it’s one of those fun words whose meaning has inverted since its creation, and finally because I stumbled on a fun etymology term and can’t resist plonking it into the blog via the story of egregious (you have been warned!).
Let’s start with the basics. What does egregious mean and where does it come from?
If you check a dictionary you will find two meanings listed. The primary one is of something being especially bad. For example – “The student failed his mathematics exams because it was littered with egregious basic miscalculations”. The second one may be marked as archaic – distinguished. There it is, egregious used to mean something was great but now it’s more likely to mean it is terrible – a total meaning inversion. You would think this is rare in the dictionary but actually it’s not. I keep meaning to do an entire article about these flip-flopping words.
Egregious joined English in the early 1500s with the meaning of distinguished or excellent as a direct borrowing from Latin (more on that later). Latin had the word egregius from the phrase ex grege (rising above the flock). Ex meaning out of (we see this in exit, for example) and grege (a variation of flock) which was drawn from the Proto Indo European root word ger (to gather). So if you stand out from the crowd, in a good sense, you’re egregious.
By the end of the 1500s the egregious positive sense had been joined by an ironic sense of being the opposite of excellent. Over time this negative version became the main one but you’ll find it used in the positive sense in novels from the 1950s, so be careful of context when you see this used in older works.
Now for the little etymology term. I was pottering around for egregious info and stumbled on a good post by Dave Wilton over at Word Origins. Dave explained that egregious is an inkhorn term and naturally I was intrigued by this idea because I hadn’t stumbled across it before. An inkhorn term is a word which was imported into English from Latin or Greek in the 1500 and 1600s. They were often used to show off that you had a classical education and “better” vocabulary than those around you. Sadly some people still like to flaunt “fancy words” in the same fashion today. Most inkhorn terms didn’t gain common use but egregious is one which did. I can only assume the inkhorn is a reference to a student needing to have a bottle of ink available for their studies.
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
