The "excellent, awesome" sense is anameliorativesemantic shift from the original sense of "evil, mischievous". Compare similar semantic development interrific andsick.
“Yes,” replied she; “and the saddest part of it all is that she is not marrying the man she loves. Oh, it is terrible. Marrying from a sense of duty! I think it is perfectlywicked, and I told her so.”
‘[…] I remember a lady coming to inspect St. Mary's Home where I was brought up and seeing us all in our lovely Elizabethan uniforms we were so proud of, and bursting into tears all over us because “it waswicked to dress us like charity children”.[…]’.
What awicked game to play, to make me feel this way / What awicked thing to do, to let me dream of you / What awicked thing to say, you never felt this way
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions atWiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
I didn't really wanna go seeOn Golden Pond with thefam, but my mom made me go, and I must say that in retrospect it was awicked expressive film, with a lot of significant meaning.
The band we went to see the other night waspissah, and they werewicked loud!
2025,Love On the Spectrum, season 3, episode 3, James and Sonia (actors):
James: It looks like you're wearing earrings also. Those are really something. Those aren't too heavy, are they? / Sonia: No, they're actually, like,wicked light.
It would appear thatwicked was originally used in and around Boston, MA, as theintensifying adverb in adjectival phrases qualifying especially (though by no means exclusively)positiveadjectives, that is, adjectives describing the goodness anddesirability of things or situations; it was never used adverbially in the qualification of verbs. Over time, phrases like "wicked good", "wicked awesome", and "wicked strong", and the highly idiomatic "wicked pissah" were often shortened by New Englanders (for whom brevity in speech may be viewed as a cultural imperative) to simply "wicked" by means of phrasalclipping. In this way, adverbial "wicked" gained an adjectival sense in its own right meaning "great"/"superlative". What is or was special to Boston and the Northeast is usage as an adverb (in adjectival phrases)and as an adjective, not the usage thereof only as an adverb. It should be noted that the Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries no longer label the adverbial usage, in qualifying/intensifying adjectives, a regionalism.
Use of "wicked" as an adjective (in the sense of "extreme, awesome") rather than an intensifying adverb ("extremely, very") is sometimes considered an error when it is used to suggest a Boston or Northeast dialect. In fact, this is not necessarily true in the case of Bostonians born in the 1960s and 70s (and perhaps later) or in other New England dialects.[1][2] "That's a wicked car" is perhaps used mostly by older Bostonians, but "that car's wicked" and especially "(that's) wicked!" (in the sense of "fantastic, awesome, great") are common in Boston.
Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828), William Barnes, editor,A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published1867,page104
