Dot Wordsworth

The changing meaning of ‘prolific’, from Orwell to the Premier League

<i>The original sense – 'producing many offspring' – seems pretty much dead</i>

issue 17 January 2015
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I read somewhere recently of a Soho artist who was a ‘prolific drinker’. The meaning is clear, but hasn’t the word been taken for a walk too far from the neatly hedged semantic field where it was bred?

Prolific is hardly ever used in the literal sense of ‘producing many offspring’.

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