awe [OE] The battle plan for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US-led forces was dubbed shock and awe. The phrase was not invented by President George W. Bush or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but came from Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (1996), by the US strategic analysts Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade. The Old English word awe originally meant ‘terror or dread’. Gradually people started to use it to express their feelings for God, thereby introducing the senses of great respect and wonder. Both awful [OE] and awesome [L16th] have become weaker in meaning over the centuries. Awful was originally used to describe things that caused terror or dread. Other old meanings included ‘awe-inspiring’ and ‘filled with awe’; the modern sense ‘extremely bad’ dates from the late 18th century. Awesome at first meant ‘filled with awe’. It later came to mean ‘inspiring awe’, and in the 1830s took on the rather weaker meaning of ‘overwhelming, remarkable, staggering’. Now it can just mean ‘great, excellent’, especially in the USA.