A history of the English Language

163.
Reintroductions and New
 
Meanings.
Sometimes the same word has been borrowed more than once in the course of time. The 
Latin words 
episcopus
and 
discus
appear in Old English as 
bishop
and 
dish
and were 
again borrowed later to make our words 
episcopal
and 
disc
(also 
dais, desk,
and 
discus
). 
In the same way 
chaos
and 
malignity
were apparently reintroduced in the sixteenth 
century. The word 
intelligence
is used once in Gower and occasionally in the fifteenth 
century, but in 
The Governour
Elyot remarks that 
“intelligence
is nowe used for an 
elegant worde where there is mutuall treaties or appoyntementes, eyther by letters or 
message.” A word when introduced a second time often carries a different meaning, and 
in estimating the importance of the Latin and other loanwords of the Renaissance it is just 
as essential to consider new meanings as new words. Indeed, the fact that a word had 
been borrowed once before and used in a different sense is of less significance than its 
reintroduction in a sense that has continued or been productive of new ones. Thus the 
word 
fastidious
is found once in 1440 with the significance ‘proud, scornful,’ but this is 
of less importance than the fact that both More and Elyot use it a century later in its more 
usual Latin sense of ‘distasteful, disgusting.’ From this it was possible for the modern 
meaning to develop, aided no doubt by the frequent use of the word in Latin with the 
force of ‘easily disgusted, hard to please, over nice.’ Chaucer uses the words 
artificial, 
declination, hemisphere
in astronomical senses, but their present use is due to the 
sixteenth century; and the word 
abject,
although found earlier in the sense of ‘cast off, 
rejected,’ was reintroduced in its present meaning in the Renaissance.