Some words seem to almost insinuate their meanings just by the very way they sound. I have always felt the word silly is one such word. There is something that seems almost inherently silly about the sound “illy” in English. Perhaps I only feel this way because I have heard comic expressions containing this sound, such as “silly billy” and “willy-nilly,” too many times. In any case, the word silly has quite an unusual and fascinating history. Indeed, of all the words in the English language, the word silly is perhaps the word with the strangest, most convoluted history of meanings.
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