For those of us living in the age of social media, unfriend is a verb describing the act of removing someone from your social media friend list. However, you might be surprised to realize that the word has quite a long history!
To be fair, it wasn’t a verb until around 2007, when it began to be used as just described on Facebook. But unfriend has been a noun meaning “enemy” in Scotland as early as the 1200s, and was still used commonly into the 1800s! And Shakespeare got in on the unfriend action too–he frequented used unfriended to describe someone who didn’t have any trusted friends.
So see there, everything new is just a borrow from something old. 😉 (Okay, maybe not everything…but certainly in this case!)
Word Nerds Unite!
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.