Why Do New Englanders Say ‘Wicked’?

Ask someone from Boston how their day is going, and there’s a strong chance they’ll say it’s “wicked good” — a phrase that includes a word whose dictionary definition means the opposite of good entirely. It’s one of the most recognizable quirks of the New England dialect, showing up everywhere from Good Will Hunting (“My boy’s wicked smart”) to local retailer Newbury Comics’ slogan, “A wicked good time!”

But why “wicked”? Are the god-fearing Puritans and the Salem witch trials to blame, as one popular theory suggests? While that makes for a colorful story, the truth is more complicated.

There is a genuine witchcraft connection buried in “wicked,” but it predates Salem by centuries. Etymologically, the word traces back to the Old English wicca and wicce, the same roots that eventually gave English the word “witch.” In its original usage, “wicked” broadly referred to sorcery and evil influence — and it was not directly tied to 17th-century Massachusetts. The word appears in writing as far back as the 13th century, and Shakespeare used “wicked” in its ordinary, negative sense decades before the Salem trials began in 1692; take, for example, the famous line “Something wicked this way comes” from Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 1), written around 1606. 

The modern New England usage of “wicked” isn’t its original form. Rather, it’s an intensifier: a word that adds force, emphasis, or degree to another word (e.g., “very” or “extremely”). “Wicked smart,” for example, carries the same meaning as “very smart.” This usage is mostly closely associated with the northeastern corner of the U.S. today, but it didn’t originate there.

Restoration-era dramatist Thomas Porter made linguistic history as one of the first to use “wicked” as an intensifier. As Danny Erker, associate professor of linguistics at Boston University, explained to Boston.com, the first recorded use of “wicked” as an adverb comes from Porter’s 1663 play A Witty Combat, or, the Female Victor: “Yesterday was a hot day, a wicked hot day.” So, the usage was coined in England — not in America by a Puritan. 

According to Merriam-Webster’s documentation of the word, the widespread use of “wicked” as an intensifier in New England is a distinctly late-20th-century phenomenon, arriving roughly 300 years after Salem. It’s safe to say, then, that neither the Puritans in general, nor the Salem trials more specifically, can lay claim to the popularization of “wicked” in the New England lexicon.  

Linguists generally point to a more mundane phenomenon to explain New England’s embrace of “wicked.” Rather than having anything to do with 17th-century witch trials, it’s a simple case of grammaticalization — a linguistic process in which independent words with clear, concrete meanings turn into abstract grammatical markers. Here, “wicked” — a word with a strong negative meaning — was gradually repurposed as an intensifier, stripped of its original significance. 

English has a long history of doing this. Words such as “terribly” and “insanely” also trace back to negative meanings — terror and insanity — yet today they simply mean “very.” If someone says, “That was an awfully good cup of tea,” everyone knows there’s nothing awful about it — quite the contrary, in fact. 

“Wicked” appears to have followed the same well-worn linguistic path. New Englanders simply did what English speakers have always done with intense words: They borrowed one that meant something bad and repurposed it to mean something good — wicked good — instead. Why exactly it gained such traction in New England is unknown. At some point during the 1900s, the expression seems to have caught on, eventually growing so widespread that it became not just a part of the New England dialect, but a part of the regional identity.