How the Zeitgeist Shapes Meaning: New Study Shows How Words Evolve Over Time

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Language is never still. Not only do new words emerge and old ones fade, but the meanings of familiar terms can shift dramatically within just a few decades. A new analysis of speeches from the U.S. Congress shows just how quickly—and how broadly—these changes take hold. It’s not only younger generations who adopt new meanings; older speakers adapt as well.

Linguists have long known that language evolves on multiple levels: form, sound, and meaning. Words appear, disappear, or subtly transform until they refer to something entirely different from what they once meant. These shifts are influenced by cultural trends, media usage, and contact with other languages. English, as the world’s dominant lingua franca, leaves particularly strong traces across the globe. German, for example, has absorbed countless English loanwords and idioms.

But English itself is far from static. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights how profoundly word meanings have changed within the language over the past century. Researchers analyzed 7.9 million congressional speeches delivered between 1873 and 2010—amounting to roughly 1.5 billion words—to trace how specific terms evolved over time.

A Century of Shifting Meanings

The research team, led by Gaurav Kamath of McGill University in Canada, focused on around 100 English words that underwent significant semantic change during the 20th century. For each term, they calculated how often it appeared, who used it, and in which sense. This allowed them to map how meanings shifted across nearly 140 years.

Some words experienced near-total transformations. The term “monitor”, for instance, referred primarily to a type of warship in the late 19th century. By the mid-20th century, it was commonly used to describe newspapers and magazines. Today, its dominant meaning is the verb “to observe.”

A similar trajectory was found for “articles.” Early in the study period, the word typically referred to physical objects. By the end, it overwhelmingly meant newspaper or news articles. Other terms, such as “workshop,” also drifted away from their original material or mechanical associations.

Older Generations Adapt Too

The researchers also examined whether age influenced how quickly speakers adopted new meanings. As expected, younger members of Congress were usually the first to use words in their updated sense. But older lawmakers were not far behind.

On average, a 20-year age gap translated into only a three-year delay in adopting a new meaning. In practical terms, a 60-year-old in 1960 might begin using a word in its modern sense just three years after a 40-year-old had already done so.

For some terms, the lag was even shorter. The word “satellite,” once used broadly to mean “companion,” rapidly shifted to its modern technological meaning. Within just two years, speakers of all ages had adopted the updated usage.