naughty [LME] Today naughty generally refers to children or animals that misbehave in a fairly harmless way, but until quite recently it was a stronger word meaning ‘wicked’ or ‘morally bad’, as in ‘An Oxe of mine being a naughty beast, through ye default of mine owne fence hath goared a Cow of your Worships’ (1592) or ‘’Tis a villanous Error of some naughty Men’ (1699). Naughty comes from the Old English word naught, ‘nothing’, and originally meant ‘possessing nothing, poor, needy’. The sense ‘mildly rude or indecent’, found in expressions such as ‘naughty bits’ [1970s], dates from the mid 16th century. Naughty but nice is first found in a late 19th-century song.