English Words

9.5.1
Semantic widening
Semantic change often involves the WIDENING (i.e. increasing the number of lexemes with distinct
meanings associated with a wordform). Widening may result either in more homonymy or in more
120 WORDS GALORE

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polysemy (i.e. more distinct but related senses of a lexeme realised by a pre-existing word-form; see section
(
2.2
)). Examples of widening are listed in [9.7]: 
[9.7]
a. Manage (originally spelt menage) means ‘to handle anything successfully’ but originally it meant ‘handle a
horse’.
b. Manufacture ‘the process of making products’. Manufacture comes from Latin manu factum ‘make by hand’. In
early modern times its meaning was extended so as to include ‘to make by hand or by machinery’. Subsequently,
in the industrial and post-industrial age it came to mean to make by machinery rather than by hand. The original
link with manual work was eventually lost.
Personal names often undergo widening. Many commercial products are named after the principal people
who were instrumental in bringing them to the market-place. We vacuum floors with Hoovers and drive
Ford
cars on macadamised roads. In so doing we are (unknowingly) paying tribute to Hoover, Henry Ford
and John Loudon McAdam.
Many scientific principles and instruments are also named after their inventors. Thus the instrument for
measuring radiation is called the Geiger-(Müller) counter after its inventor. In the centigrade system,
temperatures are measured in degrees Celsius. Anders Celsius was an eighteenth-century Swedish
astronomer. Mathematical concepts deriving from the work of the nineteenth-century British mathematician
George Boole are described as Boolean. The ratio of the speed of an aircraft in a fluid to that of the speed of
sound at the same point is referred to as mach one, mach two etc. after the Austrian physicist E. Mach who
died in 1916.