Why does 'terrible' mean bad and 'terrific' mean good?

These crossover words often require a bit of ironic slang in order to evolve

The Scream
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Terrible and terrific are both formed off the same root: terror. Both started out a few hundred years ago with the meaning of terror-inducing. But terrific took a strange turn at the beginning of the 20th century and ended up meaning really great, not terrible or terror-inducing at all.

This happened through a slow reshaping of the connections and connotations of terrific. First it acquired the sense, not just of terror-inducing but of general intensity. You could talk about a "terrific clamor," meaning a whole lot of clamor. This was a bit of hyperbole — "so much noise it was terror-inducing!" — that eventually got reduced to a general sense of "more intense than usual." Once a word like that gets established as a general intensifier, it may also be applied to positive experiences — terrific beauty, terrific joy — and from there the jump to a fully positive "terrific!" isn't so unexpected. The same thing happened to the word tremendous ("causing one to tremble in fear"). It happened to formidable (fear-inducing) too, but only in French, where it means "really great!" It hasn't quite reached that stage in English, but it has acquired positive intensifier status ("a formidable talent").

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Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.