wicked

The word "wicked" originates from Old English wicca (male witch) and wicce (female witch), derived from wiccian (to practice witchcraft). Over time, "wicked" evolved to broadly mean "evil" or "morally corrupt." By the 20th century, it gained an informal positive sense (e.g., "That concert was wicked!") through semantic inversion, a common linguistic phenomenon where negative terms are repurposed as slang positives. The suffix "-ed" here functions as an adjectival marker, though its modern usage often drops the literal connection to witchcraft.