I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the rise of people using the word “literally” in a non-literal way is one of the most hotly contested new word usages this century.  Many find this figurative use, as in “I literally died when he said that!” to be annoying at best and grammatically destructive at worst. So, how does a word like “literally” essentially end up meaning its opposite?  Well, the surprising answer is that “literally” had become much more figurative long before we got to using it the way we do today.

To see how, let’s look at how it has changed over time.

Take a minute to think back to high school and the many assignments in English class asking you to contrast the literal, or direct, meaning of a text with the more figurative meaning arising from things like metaphors and similes.  The way “literal” is used in academic assignments like these isn’t that far off from the way “literal” was mostly used when it first entered English in the late 14th century.

In these earliest times, people used the word “literally” to point to a specific type of textual reading, describing a plain or straightforward interpretation of the words compared to a moral, metaphorical, or allegorical reading of the same words — for example in this line from a piece by the philosopher, poet, and theologian Henry More: “All those passages are not to be literally understood.”  That’s almost exclusively how it was used at the time.

Already, though, this use in English was somewhat removed from the meaning of its etymological ancestor, the classical Latin word “littera.”  At the beginning of the common era, “littera” specifically referred to the letters of the alphabet or to the things involving such letters.  This is how this root also spawned the English words “literature” and “literate.”  These words came from early meanings that “littera” developed in Latin — the idea of something containing letters (literature) or of someone who studied letters (the literate).  Notice that even at this early time, those meanings were already figurative extensions of the original meaning, referring only to actual “letters,” that “littera” had in Latin.

So you can pretty clearly see how the early English meaning of “literal” and “literally” describing the plain reading of a text relates to the Latin word for letters.  After all, a literal reading is one that takes its meaning directly from the words formed by these letters.

By the 16th century, the word’s meaning morphed a little more, moving from being only about a direct meaning of a text versus deeper layers of meaning to being about emphasizing that people were being literal in what they were saying.  We can see the poet John Dryden using it this way in the line, “My daily bread is litt’rally implor’d,” to say that he begs for alms, and philosopher David Hume using it this way when he writes, “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger.”  In both cases, “literally” points to the direct or non-figurative interpretation of a statement’s meaning but also emphasizes its unusualness or significance.  In other words, the word “literally” has begun to make the literal meaning of what is said stand out as notable or come across more emphatically.

And that’s where we get the seed of our modern non-literal “literally.”  It’s this emphatic sense, as opposed to its “actual word-for-word meaning” sense, that people use to say something was extreme or intense, as in “Squiggly was literally dying with laughter when I told him the joke about the chicken crossing the road.”  Obviously, laughter isn’t usually deadly, so we can be pretty sure the meaning is figurative — the word “literally” is just adding some hyperbolic emphasis to the description of Squiggly’s reaction.

If you think about it, this is actually similar to how we sometimes use the words “really” or “truly.”  When dinner isn’t ready and someone says, “Hey, I’m really dying of starvation over here,”  or when Aardvark spends more money than he should of on his new SUV and Squiggly says, “Aardvark truly broke the bank with that one,” there is no real starvation or true breaking of the bank involved.  Instead, we’re highlighting intensity, not reality.  In the same way, the word “very” originally meant “true” or “actual” in earlier English, a meaning we still find in modern expressions like “on this very day.” But now its only common meaning is “to a high degree” in the way we use it most, as in “Squiggly is very upset at Aardvark’s overspending habit.”

All these adverbs, like “literally,” have undergone a process where one aspect of their meaning, — expressing intensity or hyperbole — wins out, while other or original senses fade away.  Linguists call this process “semantic bleaching,” where meanings are reduced, sometimes to the point that all that remains is what’s called a pragmatic function, which is something like providing emphasis or expressive power to what someone says, like with the words “really” and “very.”

“Literally” hasn’t traveled quite so far down the road of semantic bleaching that it no longer gets used in the older way to mean “non-figuratively,” which is probably why it annoys people so much.  We haven’t lost our connection to its older sense, and the fact that its newer sense seems to mean the exact opposite of its older one bothers us even more. But, in fact, many words in English have evolved over time to mean something quite contrary to their original meaning. “Soon” once meant “immediately.” “Nice” once meant “ignorant.” And “awful” no longer means being full of awe, but rather full of something not so good.

Some words still retain their two contradictory senses in modern use too. For example, “clip” can mean either cut off OR attach. You can clip the ends off some branches, or you can clip two pieces of paper together. “Cleave” is the same way. You can cleave things apart, but people can also cleave to each other.  In both cases, it is the context that makes all the difference, and listeners rarely have trouble figuring out the meaning.  Likewise, “literally” can be about the meaning of the words themselves, or it can be a way to express hyperbole or intensity, and context makes all the difference.

But if this newer use of “literally” still raises your hackles, maybe you can find comfort knowing that even literary greats like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mark Twain used it in the emphatic way, without regard to its ties to literalness.   And if it was good enough for them, it’s probably OK for the rest of us too.