Talk:awesome

The word Awesome is Early Modern English, created in 1598, hence should be listed in Etymology.--User:James102 02:09, 22 Jun 2009 (UTC)

I've never heard the terror meaning of awesome before. Is that a real meaning of the word? That is the opposite of what the word commonly means here in the USA. --Connel MacKenzie 22:42, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * It is exactly the original meaning. This is yet another musty Webster 1913 entry.  I'll fix it. -dmh 05:34, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I've updated it a bit, but I'm not quite sure how to mark the older senses. Note that terrific has gone through much the same change, and fantastic has gone through a similar change.  For that matter, awfully as a generic intensifier (that was awfully good) is probably relatively recent. -dmh 05:42, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Thank you. --Connel MacKenzie 06:50, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Getting in late on this discussion but the term awesome can mean terrifying as in "No one who was in Indonesia during the tidal wave will forget its awesome power as it swept ashore."--Epolk 17:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Should awe-inspiring really get an entry? It's not really a word, since it's normal to hyphenate two words in that manner to construct a hyphenated word-phrase. Nor is it really an idiom in any sense, since it is simply a straightforward two-word phrase meaning exactly what you would expect it to (i.e., it is not greater than the sum of its parts): something that inspires awe. I'm not so much specifically opposed to including it as I am about the idea that we should include any phrase that sees some use, even if it is simply the sum of its parts.
 * But it does seem to be a common idiom...or at least a cliché. --Connel MacKenzie 08:25, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * It feels more like a set phrase than a cliché to me, short of idiomatic, but still definitely dictionary material. &mdash; Hippietrail 14:24, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree with Hippietrail (and myself :-) here on awe-inspiring. There is now a fairly long list of categories which could potentially flood Wiktionary but in fact don't, including Pig-Latin, L33T, foreign borrowings, made-up words from published books and even regular inflections of words.  The main filter for these is attestation.  If a term isn't used in running text, then we tend to leave it out, even if it's a plausible construction.  Idiomicity also plays a role.  There's not much need for regular inflections like, say sings, but blues definitely gets an entry.


 * In the case of awe-inspiring, I think set phrase or stock phrase is a very good term. The term awe-inspiring occurs much more frequently than one would predict a priori.  For example,


 * awe gets about 4.5 million google hits
 * fear gets about 43 million google hits
 * awe-inspiring gets about 800,000 google hits
 * fear-inspiring gets about 10,000 google hits


 * So for whatever reason, awe-inspiring tends to get used far more than one would expect. It's a listeme and probably deserves an entry.


 * Hmm . . . maybe the meta-critreon for attestation is "attestation beyond chance." By that criterion, a made-up word with no google hits is indistinguishable from any other pronounceable string of letters (and in fact may be less common, since such strings occur as random misspellings), while sings with 5 million hits is probably no more common than one would expect.  But obviously meaning has to play in here somehwere . . . -dmh 15:50, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I disagree with dmh above – awful can mean both "inducing fear or terror", "appalling" and "terrible", from which the sense "very bad" is easily derived, and "awe-inspiring", "respect-inducing" and "impressive", from which the intensive meaning "exceedingly great" is just as easily derived. It's really not a significantly different development than in the case of "awesome" (and "terrific"), and the recency illusion makes me suspect that the intensive meaning of "awful" as in "an awful amount" is a lot older than dmh thinks, even though I don't have attestations at hand. Certainly, "an awful bonnet", meant positively, sounds awfully (heh) dated to me, and I think it is understood as pejorative by almost all native speakers now. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:53, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Today's Term
Today's meaning of the word "Awesome" is used by many people, but mostly Teen's and Young Adults. People use it on a daily basis, meaning "Cool" or "Wicked" (if anybody else has a meaning or anything to say, please add onto this article)