āgefull

Awful is a compound of awe and -ful, meaning, with transparent literalness, 'full of awe' — inspiring awe, commanding reverence, filling the beholder with wonder and solemn dread. The Old English form āgefull (from ege, 'awe, terror, dread') carried exactly this meaning: something awful was something that stopped you in your tracks, something so vast or sacred or powerful that the proper response was silent reverence. An awful God was a God worthy of worship. An awful king was a king who commanded genuine respect. An awful sight was a sight that overwhelmed the senses. The word was a compliment paid to power, a recognition that some things are too great for casual response.

The pivot began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when awful started to lose its positive charge and retain only the negative. The awe in awful had always contained an element of fear — the sublime was terrifying as well as beautiful, and to stand in awe was to tremble as well as admire. As the word's usage broadened, the trembling outlasted the admiration. An awful storm was no longer sublime but destructive. An awful noise was no longer awe-inspiring but merely unpleasant. The dread that had been part of a larger, richer emotional response — the fear that accompanied wonder — became the whole of the word's meaning. Awful went from naming the experience of the sacred to naming the experience of the unacceptable.

The English language responded to the loss by creating a replacement: awesome. This newer formation, using the same root word awe, now carries the positive meaning that awful once held. Something awesome is impressive, magnificent, worthy of admiration — precisely what awful meant before its fall. The two words stand as before-and-after portraits of the same concept: awful is what happens when a word keeps the fear and loses the wonder; awesome is the attempt to recover the wonder without the fear. The substitution is so complete that modern speakers hear no connection between awful and awesome, though they are constructed from identical materials — awe plus a suffix, wonder plus grammar.

The collapse of awful is part of a broader pattern in English: words associated with intense emotion tend to weaken over time, a process linguists call semantic bleaching. Terrible once meant 'inspiring terror' (terrific meant the same). Dreadful once meant 'full of dread.' Horrid once meant 'causing horror.' Each of these words has been domesticated, reduced from the language of the sublime to the language of mild complaint. An awful meal, a terrible movie, a dreadful afternoon — these are inconveniences, not encounters with the sacred. The words have been drained of the very intensity that gave them their original power, leaving husks of complaint where once there were cries of genuine awe.