Hey y’all! As I was feeling appreciative of my lovely boyfriend, I was thinking to myself how handsome he is and then started getting distracted thinking about how weird a word that is to mean attractive. And it’s usually in a masculine way these days, but I’ve definitely read older books where it was for women and was mostly a compliment as far as I could tell. And yet the word itself by rights sounds more like an action or request to give an item to another person. So what happened here??

Origins of “handsome”
When did it first get used?
1400s
What does it mean?
modern day meaning of attractive, usually for men or strong featured women
originally, though… it meant easy to handle or readily at hand. So my instinct was right: it did have more to do with being given something or an object being held!
and then in 1580s it started to track with the meaning of an attractive or pleasing thing (or person)
and then in 1680s to extend the 1580s meaning to items to mean generous more broadly, as in “I’ll reward you handsomely”
And you know when it finally started to mean heavily that something was “agreeable to the eye” as they used to phrase it? Not until 1848!!
Continue reading “Word Origins: from fact to compliment with “handsome””