Occasionally everyone has a night when they can’t seem to get to sleep. They toss and turn and can’t settle in. They’re “restive.” Or, wait, is that “restless”?
“Restive” has an interesting history, at least for a word (the Tower of London’s history is probably more interesting, but as a cultural landmark, it wouldn’t be a fair comparison). Anyway, it showed up in English around the 1400s, borrowed from the French “rétif,” and its original English spelling was “restiff.” Back then it referred to a stubborn horse that refused to move. Evidently its connection to horses had something to do with its spelling, because around the late 1800s, just about when horses began to be replaced by steam engines, “restiff” faded from use.
There was already a replacement available, though. “Restive” became a variant of “restiff” in the 1500s and stuck around long enough to become a separate word. “Restive” abandoned its horsey connections and was used to mean sluggish or unmoving — anything or anyone, that is, not just a horse. In 1699, Lionel Wafer published “A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America,” which included this bit: “Notwithstanding their being thus sluggish and dull and restive in the Day-time, yet when Moon-shiny nights come, they are all Life and Activity.”
But later on, around the mid to late 1800s, people began to get confused about the “rest” part of “restive” — even though it’s just there by accident, and “restive” was never associated with the word “rest.” The confusion had the effect of completely reversing the meaning of the word, so that by around 1900 “restive” had come to mean fidgety or impatient. One of the first uses of “restive” to mean the opposite of sluggish was in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852: “Aunt Chloe..was getting rather restive; the merriment of the evening being to her somewhat after the Scripture comparison—like ‘vinegar upon nitre’.”
By the time E.M.Forster published “Room with a View” in 1908, the new (and opposite) meaning of “restive” had become the rule rather than the exception: “Such music is not for the piano, and her audience began to get restive.” But the matter still wasn’t entirely settled, because if you check the 1965 edition of “Fowler’s Modern English Usage,” it tries to point out that “restless” and “restive” are not the same: “A horse may be restless when loose in a field, but can only be restive if it is resisting control. A child can be restless from boredom, but can only be restive if someone is trying to make him do what he does not want.”
But here the meaning of “restive” is a bit different, even if you take their point that it’s not the same as “restless.” “Restless” means unable to settle down, but “restive” (note that the horses are back) supposedly has to do with resisting control. So really there are three meanings of “restive” — the first is really what “restiff” meant, back when that was still a word: a horse that won’t move. The second meaning is based on the reluctance of the horse — this is what Fowler’s is emphasizing, although suggesting it’s not just horses that might resist control. And the third is the most widely used meaning, in which “restive” and “restless” mean the same thing.
There’s a geographic migration of meaning going on as well. If you check American dictionaries starting around 1870 (Webster’s has an 1870 edition), “restive” is defined as “impatient” or “fidgety.” But the Oxford English Dictionary of 1908 doesn’t include that definition at all — however, it did appear in the next edition. New meanings of “restive” seem to be inherently restless. Now, where did that horse wander off to?
