eenth century it had only the
special meaning (which it still keeps as one of its meanings) of an
"order" or "society" of monks. In the fourteenth century it began to
have the meaning of "fixed arrangement," but the adjective _orderly_
and the noun _orderliness_ did not come into use until the sixteenth
century. The word _regular_ has a similar history. Coming from the
Latin _regula_, "a rule," its modern general meaning in English of
"according to rule" seems very natural; but the word which began to be
used in English in the fourteenth century did not take the modern
meaning until the end of the sixteenth century. Before this, it too
was used as a word to describe monastic orders. The "regular" clergy
were priests who were also monks, while the "secular" clergy were
priests but not monks. The words _regularity_, _regulation_, and
_regulate_ did not come into use until the seventeenth century.

Another word which has now a quite different meaning from its original
meaning is _clerk_. A "clerk" nowadays is a person who is employed in
an office to keep accounts, write letters, etc. But a "clerk" in the
Middle Ages was what we should now more generally call a "cleric," a
man in Holy Orders. As the "clerks" in the Middle Ages were
practically the only people who could read and write, it is, perhaps,
not unnatural that the name should be now used to describe a class of
people whose chief occupation is writing (whether with the hand or a
typewriter). People in the Middle Ages would have wondered what could
possibly be meant by a word which is common in Scotland for a "woman
clerk"--_clerkess_.

The words which change their meanings in this way tell us the longest,
and perhaps the best, stories of all.

CHAPTER XVII.

DIFFERENT WORDS WITH THE SAME MEANING, AND THE SAME WORDS WITH
DIFFERENT MEANINGS.

We have seen that there are great numbers of words in English which
come from the Latin language. Sometimes they have come to us through
Old French words borrowed from the Latin, and sometimes from the Latin
words directly, or modern French words taken from the Latin. The fact
that we have borrowed from the Latin in these two ways has led
sometimes to our borrowing twice over from the same word. Different
forms going back in this way to the same origin are known as
"doublets." The English language is full of them, and they, too, can
tell us some interesting stories.

Many of these pairs of words seem to have no re