Outstanding

It’s difficult to pin down exactly when this neutral “standing out” connotation of “outstanding” gave way to the meaning “exceptionally good,” as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the sense. The earliest citation the current edition of the OED provides that clearly invokes this positive sense is from 1936 (“Your lawn tennis was outstanding; you were a magnificent boxer”), but the previous edition (1989) of the OED doesn’t list this positive sense at all. If I had to guess (and I guess I do) when the transition took place, I’d venture that it was a gradual process that really got going in the mid-20th century and spread through the mass media, particularly television advertising. The same shift of meaning, as you note, has affected “exceptional” as well as “remarkable,” both of which originally meant simply “not in the normal run of things” but now connote something more than likely to also warrant the adjectives “new,” “improved,” and “must-have.”

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