Which Shakespeare words have completely changed meaning in modern English?

But you can still find “thee” and “thou” etc. in any large dictionary as technically correct English, although basically, only poets still use them. (“A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou”.)

Another, though less radical change, is the word “doom.” Shakespeare uses this word in it’s traditional meaning, which is roughly the same as “fate.” So does Tolkien. So, Tolkien names the big mountain in Mordor “Mt. Doom,” meaning that this is where the fate of Middle Earth will be decided, for good or ill.

In Shakespeare’s day, “doubt” meant “fear”…. it did not always mean a lack of confidence in the statement. So, if Shakespeare has a character say:

Why does it matter so much to atheists that God doesn't exist?

Several words have changed significantly. One that I always keep on eye out for is “doubt.”

In Shakespeare’s day, people still frequently used the INFORMAL forms of “you,” which are “thee” and “thou” etc. This is highly misleading to today’s audience, because we no longer use “thee” and “thou” to suggest that people are on a first-name basis. For reasons not altogether clear to me, “thee” and “thou” have simply been dropped from common usage.

And the difference is not trivial, because, to make the meter come out as Shakespeare intended. actors should use the Elizabethan pronunciation, re-VEN-ue.

What is better, 4 more years of Trump with the media trying to hurt him, or 8 years of DeSantis with the media licking booty, or 4 to 8 years of RFK with the media hating on him all the time? (Biden is not an option, he can't win)

REV-en-nue

To most people today, “doom” is necessarily a terrible thing. Traditionally — and in Tolkien and Shakespeare both — “doom” (as in Doomsday) is where fate will be decided. But not necessarily a BAD fate for everyone concerned.

I doubt the French will conquer us today.

Why do doctors refuse HRT to menopausal women but hand them out to trans people?

re-VEN-ue

To make things even MORE confusing, the use of “thee” and “thou” is still technically correct — technically, it is still valid English to use them. However, almost no one ever uses them anymore, and paradoxically, they sound archaic and thus more formal, not less.

Maybe the most confusing evolution of words is in the area, of the second-person address (that is, the word “you”)…

Have you ever been humiliated in front of a group of girls and enjoyed it?

What he means is “I FEAR the French will conquer us today.” In today’s English, this sentence would mean the precise opposite — “Relax, because I don’t think the French will conquer us.”

Whereas today we always pronounce it

And yet today, “doom” necessarily means a terrible fate… For in the Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine,” that machine was a giant planet killer that went around wiping out entire civilizations. It therefore meted out a BAD fate, never a good one.

How did you cope when someone you love, dealing with hyper-independence and trauma, felt they needed space to heal alone? Were you able to support them without overstepping, and did you eventually reconnect? How did that journey unfold?

Sometimes the change in words was a difference in pronunciation. You see this all the time, and some companies ignore this difference. A particularly common case is “revenue” and it comes up a great deal. Shakespeare would have pronounced it this way: