A select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present

SELECT GLOSSARY
ENGLISH WORDS USED FORMERLY IN SENSES DIFFERENT FROM THEIR PRESENT
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.
ARCHBISHOP
‘Res fugiunt, vocabula manent’
SEVENTH EDITION
REVISED BY A. L. MAYHEW, M.A.
LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1890
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This volume is intended to be a contribution, though a very slight one at best, to a special branch of the study of our own language. It proposes to trace in a popular manner and for general readers the changes of meaning which so many of its words have undergone; words which, as current with us as they were with our forefathers, yet meant something different on their lips from what they mean on ours. Of my success in carrying out the scheme which I had set before myself, it does not become me to speak, except to say that I have fallen a good deal below my hopes, and infinitely below my desires. But of the scheme itself I have no doubts. I feel sure that, if only adequately carried out, few works of the same compass could embrace matter of more manifold instruction, or in a region of knowledge which it would be more desirable to occupy. In the present condition of education in England, above all with the pressure upon young men, which is ever increasing, to complete their educational course at the earliest possible date, the number of those enjoying the inestimable advantages, mental and moral, which more than any other languages the Latin and the Greek supply, must ever be growing smaller. It becomes therefore a necessity to seek elsewhere the best substitutes within reach for that discipline of the faculties which these languages would better than any other have afforded. And I believe, when these two are set aside, our own language and literature will furnish the best substitutes; such as, even though they may not satisfy perfectly, are not therefore to be rejected. I am persuaded that in the decomposition , word by word, of small portions of our best poetry and prose, the compensations which we look for are most capable of being found; even as I have little doubt that in many of our higher English schools compensations of the kind are already oftentimes obtained. Lycidas suggests itself to me, in the amount of resistance which it would offer, as in verse furnishing more exactly what I seek than any other poem, perhaps some of Lord Bacon’s Essays in prose.