World Wide Words: Whilom

WHILOM/ˈhwaɪləm/

An adjective meaning former.

This adjective is one of three — the others being erstwhile and quondam — all with the same meaning. They are equally strange and un-English in appearance. But whilom is probably the weirdest of the set, and also the least used, to the extent that I had trouble finding a contemporary example. Here’s an older one, from J M Barrie’s book The Little White Bird of 1903: “Whom did I see but the whilom nursery governess sitting on a chair in one of these gardens”, meaning that the lady had once been a governess, but was one no longer. The word dates to Old English, at a time when the language was heavily inflected — adjectives, nouns, and verbs taking different endings depending on the job they were doing. Whilom — then spelt hwilom — was the dative plural of hwil, the same word as our modern while. As English progressively lost its inflections, the word became a fossil, with its ending stuck to it permanently; at the same time the meaning shifted to mean something of a former time, a change that was complete by the fifteenth century.