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Gifted With: A brief survey of usage changes

by Heather Rose Jones

copyright © 2005, all rights reserved

An e-mail list that I frequent turned to the question of turns of phrase that drive one crazy -- especially ones that are (perceived as) new coinages. I'm always fascinated by the contrast between what people believe about language correctness and what the data on the ground say about usage, so I took one example and ran with it.

The question concerned examples like,, "He gifted me with a cloak." rather than "He gave me a cloak." The questioner was curious where this usage came from and whether it had been in long-standing use or was a relatively recent phenomenon.

Here is my response on the mailing list, with occasional elaborations and modifications.

My perception has been that this use of "gift" has really taken off in the last decade or two, but see the usage discussions at:

<http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/0142.html>

• (summary: usage discouraged despite occasional use over the last couple centuries)

<http://www.lssu.edu/banished/archive/1994.php>

• (summary: semi-humorous site listing it as an officially "banished word" in 1994, confirming my estimate of when it began to become annoyingly omnipresent)

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites examples of "gift" as a verb beginning in the 15th century in the sense "talented, blessed by God or nature", e.g., "See how the Lord gifted him above his brethren." (1608), or without an overt "gift" being mentioned, e.g., "He gyfted them richely with right good speede. (15th c.) In what appears to be a technical legal sense, we find examples starting in the 17th century that include an overt "gift" and much the same syntax as seen in the modern construction under consideration, e.g., "The recovery of a parcel of ground which the Queen had gifted to Mary Levinston." (1639) This sense is noted as being chiefly Scottish and the examples focus heavily on real estate transations or formal bequests of money or objects.

To survey modern usage, I searched on the exact phrases "gifted me" and "gave me" in Google groups (an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings). This seemed like an easily accessible and searchable corpus of informal language. Data was counted in terms of hits on whole messages -- i.e., a message was counted once no matter how many examples of the phrase it might contain. This search found the following hit distribution:

Digging a little deeper, during the 1981-1986 period, the word "gifted" has 106 hits. The overwhelming use is as an adjective equivalent to "talented". Rarely (perhaps a dozen examples) it appears as "gifted with <attribute or object>" primarily where the implied "gifter" is divine or the functional equivalent. Only one example has a more concrete agent (the writer indicates that he "gifted" his son "with a new car") and the grammar follows the construction for the "talented" sense, rather than the more recent "gifted <recipient> <gift>".

We can pin down the rise more specifically by looking at a year by year ratio of "gave me" to "gifted me". There is also an interesting change in the syntax of the construction with regard to how the "gift" is marked. This table also shows the percentage of "gifted me" examples that appear as "gifted me with <gift>" as opposed to "gifted me <gift>". Note that the numbers for some of the earlier years included here are very small for any form of "gifted me".

* partial year

Or in more graphic form:

So the heyday of "gifted me"falls around the second half of the '90s,with the peak (i.e., when the ratio is smallest) in 1998 but has been losing ground in recent years. In contrast, the syntax of "to gift" has steadily shifted from a simple transitive with prepositional oblique, similar to "to endow" or "to enrich":

• "<agent> gifted <recipient> with <gift>"
• "<recipient> was gifted with <gift> by <giver>"
• impossible to use <gift> as the subject

to being a di-transitive verb, essentially identical to "to give"

• "<agent> gifted <recipient> <gift>"
• "<recipient> was gifted <gift> by <giver>"
• "<gift> was gifted to <recipient> by <giver>"

(Interestingly, a new syntactic construction seems to be arising: "<agent> gifted <recipient> of <gift>" but it's extremely rare at this point.)

In the above survey, I've attempted to correct for variable amounts of material available for different years by normalizing to "gave". As with any linguistic corpus survey, the results will be affected by genre, but the informal, conversational nature of Usenet seems likely to represent the leading edge of this sort of fashion. Therefore, the perception that the everyday use of "gift" as a verb has exploded on the scene quite recently appears to be borne out to a significant extent and is not entirely contradicted by examples of earlier use. The perception is likely to be based on frequency of everyday encounters rather than occasional technical or literary encounters.

Note that "gift" as a verb in this modern everyday use has a much narrower meaning than "gave", specifically, "gave as a gift or present". My anecdotal observation (looking through the above Google Groups data) is that it seems to carry a very strong implication of an unexpected and pleasant event, performed from friendship, without any expectation (or previous context) of reciprocity. This suggests that the popularity of the verb "to gift" may be rising out of a desire to emphasize this aspect of the events.

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