But in truth all general terms are popularly and classically used in somewhat different senses.
Figurative or tropical language chiefly consists in the transfer of words to new senses, as by metaphor or metonymy.

In the course of years, too, words change their meanings; and before the time of Dryden our whole vocabulary was much more fluid and adaptable than it has since become.

Such authors as Bacon, Milton, and Sir Thomas Browne often used words derived from the Latin in some sense they originally had in Latin, though in English they had acquired another meaning.

Spenser and Shakespeare, besides this practice, sometimes use words in a way that can only be justified by their choosing to have it so; whilst their contemporaries, Beaumont and Fletcher, write the perfect modern language, as Dryden observed.

Lapse of time, however, is not the chief cause of variation in the sense of words.