Toward or Towards Part V

Uh, maybe this blog isn't turning out to be as entertaining as I had envisioned. I seem to have strayed a long way from funny church signs and trivialities about a favourite food substance, but I promise (myself) I'll finish what I have to say about toward and towards here and move on to something more fun.

The adjectival and adverbial uses of toward/towards:

Toward was used as an adjective meaning "impending," as in There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are comming to the Arke (Shakespeare, As You Like It).

When used of young people, it meant "promising," as in There was never mother had a towarder son (Heywood, Edward IV Part I).

Toward could also mean "favourable," as in He too sends for the Greek ship a toward breeze (Gladstone, Juventus Mundi). Incidentally, about the only survival of this adjectival sense of toward in modern English is in the adjective untoward , meaning "awkward" or "unlucky."

The adverbial uses of toward/towards are not always easy to distinguish from the adjectival, but in the sentence A varlet ronning towards hastily (Spenser, The Faerie Queene), the word clearly functions as an adverb of direction.

One last thing: The adverbial forms of toward are not limited to the zero-derived or endingless toward and the genitive towards. There was also the (now obsolete) form towardly!

Happily, this series of posts is now hastening toward(s) a conclusion.