Language

A Select Glossary of English Words

by Richard Chenevix Trench

Trench’s glossary makes semantic change visible word by word, showing how familiar English expressions once carried senses that can mislead modern readers of older literature and scripture.

A Select Glossary of English Words summary

Richard Chenevix Trench’s A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from Their Present is a historical-semantic reference work first published in the nineteenth century. Instead of defining obscure vocabulary, Trench deliberately chooses words that still look familiar but once carried meanings different from—or broader than—their modern senses. His examples come from earlier English writers, scripture translations, sermons, poetry, and prose, allowing readers to see meaning change in context. The book’s central problem is deceptively simple: recognition is not comprehension. A modern reader may encounter a familiar spelling in Shakespeare, Milton, an early Bible translation, or another older text and unconsciously assign today’s meaning to it. Trench’s glossary interrupts that false familiarity. Modern historical semantics uses larger corpora, more rigorous dating, and stronger etymological resources, so individual explanations should be checked rather than treated as final. The lasting lesson remains powerful: word meaning is historical, and apparent continuity of form can hide major changes in sense, connotation, and usage.

Key ideas

Familiar words can be false friends across time: The spelling may survive while the dominant meaning changes. Context is essential evidence: Historical senses become visible through dated literary and religious examples rather than isolated definitions. Semantic narrowing and broadening matter: A word can lose older senses, specialize, generalize, or shift toward a new evaluative meaning. Connotation changes alongside denotation: Words can become more positive, negative, formal, comic, or morally loaded over time. Old texts require historical reading: Assigning a present-day sense automatically can distort an author’s argument or tone. Selection is pedagogical, not exhaustive: Trench chooses illustrative cases to awaken curiosity about language change rather than build a complete historical dictionary. Quotation creates a mini-corpus: Repeated examples across authors allow readers to infer how a sense functioned in earlier usage. Etymology and semantics must be separated: A word’s origin does not by itself determine what it meant in a particular century. Modern verification improves the method: Historical dictionaries and digitized corpora can now test dating, frequency, and competing senses more systematically.

Analysis

1. The book targets the danger of false familiarity Historical reading becomes especially risky when a word looks completely ordinary. An obviously obsolete term sends the reader to a glossary; a familiar word often does not. Trench’s selection principle is therefore clever: he focuses on vocabulary that encourages overconfidence. The reader thinks the word is understood because the form survives, while the older sentence may depend on a sense that later narrowed, disappeared, or changed evaluation. 2. Semantic change is demonstrated through use The glossary’s evidence is contextual. Trench cites earlier writers and textual traditions to show how a sense operated. This matters because a historical definition without examples can feel arbitrary. Multiple passages let the reader see recurring relationships among word, object, and discourse. In modern terms, his method approximates a hand-built historical corpus, though his sample is shaped by the texts available and prestigious to him. 3. Meaning can move in several directions A word may once cover a broader range and later specialize. Another may broaden. Some senses fade while new ones become dominant. Evaluative coloring can also change, producing amelioration or pejoration. Trench’s examples are useful because they discourage the simplistic idea that semantic change means one old definition being replaced overnight by one ne…

Practical application

Choose a familiar word from a pre-1900 text that seems slightly strange in context. Before checking a dictionary, write what the passage would mean under the current sense. Then consult a historical dictionary or dated examples and reconstruct the older sense. Compare the two interpretations and note what changes in tone or argument. Finally, search a later corpus to see whether both senses coexisted. The exercise directly targets the false-familiarity problem that makes Trench’s glossary useful.

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