This is Origins in Five. Five minutes, one word. A small story to start the day. Today's word is awful. It is not a pleasant word. It is usually used as an insult. You played awful. The food was awful. You have awful taste in music. Of course it doesn't have to be someone insulting you. You can say it about yourself. I feel awful. I was awful to that nice person. The list goes on. Nobody, whether it is you or somebody else, is handing out compliments when they use the word awful. But the funny thing is they once were. The word awful goes back almost a thousand years. It is rooted in the Old English word awe, which meant worthy of respect or fear, or causing dread. In that sense, the word awe itself has changed over the years. When we think about the word today, we think about looking upon the great pyramids or a sight of natural beauty. But that doesn't really cause dread. In Old English, the word awe was focused on what you might feel when standing before something that is so powerful that is beyond your comprehension. And so the word awful originally meant inspiring awe, which was worthy of respect, reverence, or fear. It was a word reserved for things that stopped you in your tracks. To call something awful was to say commanded respect, perhaps through a little bit of fear. As you can imagine, the use of the word awe was particularly shaped by its use in religious context. There was a reverence to a supreme being or something extremely powerful. In that context, the word awful was almost a sacred word. As you may have guessed, the word awful was not alone in this context. It had a sister word that was built from the same root, the word awesome. Awesome first appeared in the sixteenth century, and its earliest sense was full of awe or expressiveness of awe. The two words awful and awesome started out in almost exactly the same place. Both meant something like filled with or inspiring awe. They were essentially synonyms. And then they went in completely opposite directions. By the end of the eighteenth century, awful had acquired its now familiar definition. The dread and fear baked into the original meaning of awe slowly crowded out the wonder and reverence until awful came to mean simply something bad. Awesome took the other path. It held on to the wonder, it shed the fear, and eventually, especially by the late twentieth century, became one of the most enthusiastically positive words in the English language. Whether it was a surfer, a teenager, or frankly anyone else, the word awesome was a word for celebration. It was the same root, the same origin, they were essentially twins, but one took the good path and the other took the bad path. So the next time something goes wrong and you start using the word awful, remember that once, not so long ago, in the right context, it might have been the highest compliment you could get. And that's origins in five. One word, one story to start your day.