Words That Changed Meaning

Six terms whose current sense is not their first one, each with both senses dated. A dictionary records where a word ended up. What this set records is the distance travelled, which is usually the more interesting fact and is almost never printed.

Transgender is the largest shift: John Oliven used it in 1965 for something considerably narrower than the umbrella it names now, and the widening happened in the 1990s, which is why sources from either side of that decade appear to contradict each other. Genderflux moved the other way, from a broad 1994 sense of shifting between genders to the precise modern one about intensity rather than direction. Butch began as general slang for masculine, tied to an abbreviation of butcher and to an outlaw's nickname, before becoming a central identity in lesbian bar culture in the 1940s. Mahu is the hardest case in the set, since the change was done to the word rather than by it: a ceremonial Hawaiian role turned into a slur under missionary and American rule and has been deliberately reclaimed since the 1990s. The set is ordered by how far each word travelled. It excludes terms that merely broadened in scope without changing what they claim, and it excludes the ones whose first sense is undocumented, which is most of the microlabels.