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

by Richard Chenevix Trench

Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, act i. sc. 1.

Counterfeit. Now, to imitate with the purpose of passing off the imitation as the original; but no such dishonest intention was formerly implied in the word.

I wol noon of thapostles counterfete:

I wol have money, wolle, chese and whete,

Al were it yeven of the prestes page,

Or of the porest wydow in a village.

Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Prologue (Morris, p. 90).

Christ prayseth not the unrighteous stuard, neither setteth him forth to us to counterfeit, because of his unrighteousness, but because of his wisdom only, in that he with unright so wisely provided for himself.—Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon.

But for the Greek tongue they do note in some of his epistles that he [Brutus] counterfeited that brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedæmonians.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 818.

Courtesan. The Low Latin ‘cortesanus’ was once one haunting the court, a courtier, ‘aulicus,’ though already in Shakespeare we often meet the word in its present use.