Fulsome

It’s funny that two much misused words end in —some: fulsome and noisome. Noisome is the less often used at all, and then usually as though it meant noisy. There is a word noisesome that does mean noisy, coined 80 years ago, but noisome has meant ‘unpleasant’ or ‘offensive’, especially ‘smelly’, for 400 years or more.

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Of the words ending some that were in use before the Conquest, only three remain: winsome, lovesome and longsome (meaning ‘slow’ or ‘tedious’) and I’m not sure that the last really is still used. The case is different with fulsome, which has been around since the 14th century. It is hardly ever used correctly. In which case, you may ask, has its meaning now changed?

An obsolete meaning of fulsome was ‘abundant’ ‘plentiful’.