When Native Speakers Disagree About a Word

Some English words have two meanings that contradict each other, and educated native speakers are split on which one is correct. Peruse, nonplussed, decimate, literally. For a learner the useful question is not who wins the argument. It is what happens to your sentence when a reader holds the other meaning.

What “contested” means here, and what it does not

This is not about slang, and it is not about errors.

A contested word is one where a sense shift is still in progress: the older meaning is alive, the newer meaning is widespread, and dictionaries have entered both. Nobody is making a mistake. The two groups simply learned the word at different points in its drift, and neither has any reason to suspect a problem.

That is what makes these words different from ordinary vocabulary difficulty. With a hard word you know you do not know it. With a contested word both people are confident, and the misunderstanding is silent.

Compare three things that often get lumped together:

• Contested senses, like peruse and nonplussed and decimate. Both meanings are in dictionaries and the disagreement is real
• Stigmatised forms, like irregardless or could care less. Not contested, just widely disliked. Everyone knows what you meant
• Simple confusions, like affect and effect. One of them is right, and we went through those in commonly confused words

Only the first group creates a comprehension risk. The other two create a social risk, which is a smaller problem than it feels like.

The short list that actually matters

Most articles on this subject run to thirty words. The number that matters to a learner is closer to six, because most drifting words drift into a sense close enough to the original that nothing breaks.

Word	Older sense	Newer sense	How far apart
peruse	read carefully, go through in detail	skim, glance over	Opposite
nonplussed	bewildered, at a loss	unbothered, unfazed	Opposite
moot	arguable, open to debate	irrelevant, not worth debating	Opposite
decimate	reduce by a tenth	destroy most of	Same direction, different scale
enormity	extreme wickedness	enormous size	Different, but rarely confusing
literally	word for word, actually	intensifier	Different, rarely confusing

The top three are the dangerous ones. If a colleague asks you to peruse a contract, the two readings give you opposite instructions, and you will not find out which they meant until it is too late to matter.

The bottom three are noisy rather than dangerous. When someone says the enormity of the task, nobody is confused about what they mean; some readers simply wish they had said enormousness. That is a complaint about style, not a failure to communicate.

The dictionary will not settle it

The instinct is to look it up and take the first definition as the real one. Dictionaries do not work that way.

A modern dictionary records how a word is used, and when usage splits, it enters both senses and sometimes attaches a note or a regional label. That note is doing something specific: it is telling you the sense exists and that some readers object. It is not a ruling.

This is worth understanding in general, because usage labels carry a lot of information that learners skip past. We went through them in the dictionary labels learners skip.

For nonplussed in particular, several dictionaries mark the unbothered sense as North American and informal. That is more useful than a verdict, because it tells you roughly which readers hold which meaning.

The argument about literally is older than everyone assumes

Worth a section on its own, because it is the one people are most confident about.

The usual story is that literally as an intensifier is a recent collapse, driven by teenagers, and that it destroys a useful word. The first part is checkable and false. The OED’s earliest citation for the hyperbolic sense comes from 1769, in Frances Brooke’s novel The History of Emily Montague, where a character is “literally to feed among the lilies.” The citation was still there in the dictionary’s 2011 revision. Writers have been doing this for two and a half centuries.

I find this genuinely useful to know, and not because it wins the argument. It does not. The sense still irritates a large number of readers, and that irritation is a fact about your audience regardless of what the OED says.

What it changes is the reasoning. You are not avoiding literally because it is wrong. You are avoiding it because a predictable share of readers will be distracted, and there is no upside to spending their attention on that. That is a much easier rule to apply consistently than a rule based on correctness, because it does not collapse the moment someone shows you a citation.

The two risks are not the same size

Here is the part that usually gets inverted.

Using a contested word carries two different risks. One is that your reader takes the other meaning and misunderstands you. The other is that your reader judges your English. Learners tend to worry about the second and get hurt by the first.

The judgment risk is real but small and recoverable. Someone thinks you write a bit informally. Nothing else happens.

The comprehension risk compounds silently. If you write “I perused the report” meaning you skimmed it, and your manager takes the careful-reading sense, the misunderstanding does not surface at that moment. It surfaces later, when you turn out not to know what was in the report, and it looks like carelessness rather than a vocabulary mismatch.

So the ranking is straightforward. Words where the two senses give opposite instructions are worth avoiding in writing that leads to action. Words where the two senses merely offend some readers are worth avoiding in formal writing and are otherwise fine.

What to do in exams and formal writing

A short set of rules that does not require you to hold an opinion about language change.

• Keep peruse, nonplussed and moot out of anything that instructs someone. The downside is a misread instruction and the upside is nothing. Read carefully, unfazed and irrelevant all do the job
• Drop literally as an intensifier in academic or professional writing, for the audience reason above rather than a correctness one
• Decimate is fine for heavy losses. The one-tenth sense is historical, the objection is a minority position, and no reader will be confused
• Enormousness is the safer choice for size, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over enormity. The meaning arrives intact either way
• In a speaking test, use the plain word. You’ve no way to know which sense your examiner holds and no time to repair a misunderstanding

What ties these together is the lack of feedback. When you’re producing language you don’t find out whether you were understood, so you may as well pick the option that can’t go wrong.

Reading is the opposite problem

Everything above is about what you write. Reading needs the reverse instinct.

When you meet one of these words in a text, do not assume the sense you learned. Assume either is possible and let the sentence decide. Usually it will. “Nonplussed, she carried on as though nothing had happened” can only be the unbothered sense; the older sense would contradict the second clause.

This is a specific skill and it is worth practising deliberately, because the alternative is confidently misreading a sentence. Contested words are one of the few places where knowing a word can be worse than not knowing it: not knowing it makes you check, and knowing one sense makes you sail past.

A quick habit that works. When a sentence turns out to be strange with the meaning you assumed, try the opposite meaning before deciding the writer made an error. Words carrying two opposed senses are common enough that this is usually the explanation rather than a mistake; English words that are their own opposite covers the extreme end of that.

This is harder for non-native speakers than for native ones, for two reasons, and neither is about vocabulary size.

The first is that native speakers carry a rough sense of which meaning a given reader is likely to hold, built from years of noticing who says what. You do not have that map, and it cannot be studied directly because it is demographic rather than linguistic.

The second is less comfortable. When a native speaker uses a contested word in the newer sense, readers read it as a style choice. When a learner does the same thing, some readers read it as an error. The word is identical; the interpretation is not. That asymmetry is not fair, and it is also not going to change on the timescale of your exam.

The practical response is not to master the controversy. It is to route around the small number of words where it bites.

The words not worth worrying about

Some words carry a reputation for being contested and are not, and worrying about them wastes attention.

Irregardless is the clearest case. It is in dictionaries, marked nonstandard, and every reader knows exactly what it means. There is no comprehension risk at all. It is purely a stigmatised form, so the whole question is about register, and register is a simpler thing to manage than an ambiguous meaning.

Could care less is the same shape. It is illogical and it is completely transparent. Nobody has ever been confused by it.

The same goes for the “rules” people wield about splitting infinitives or ending a sentence with a preposition. Those are not meaning disputes at all. Both constructions are ordinary English and always have been.

Keep your attention on the six words in the table. Everything else on the usual lists is either a matter of taste or someone else’s hobby.

How Vocaby fits

Vocaby carries IPA and native audio on all 29,000+ of its words, and each entry shows the word in an example sentence rather than as a bare definition. For contested words that context is the part that matters, because the sense a word carries is decided by the sentence around it, not by the gloss.

FSRS spaced repetition then brings a word back on a schedule tied to how well you actually recall it. That is useful here for a slightly unusual reason: contested words are exactly the ones you think you know, and the ones you think you know are the ones that quietly fade. You can see how an entry is laid out on any of the word pages.

Learn both senses, write with neither. That is the whole strategy.

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