I must admit, I had never heard of sperate, until a person known as Dr Goodword sent it to me.

This word comes from speratus, that refers to “hoped for”. If you feel hopeless, you sometimes despair.

But the word sperate has almost never been used, at least in recent times. Dr Goodword said sperate had “been left to die alone in law offices”. He said the word had a meaning of “hoped for, anticipated, having some likelihood of recovering debts”.

So far as I can tell, the word sperate had its first use in 1551, when it referred to “sperate debtes”.

Ten years later debts were referred to in the comment that nobody knew which debts were bad and which were sperate.

There was some hope of recovering sperate debts.

As late as 1798 an attempt was made to distinguish debts according to which were bad and which were sperate.

The word found limited general use.

In 1824 the United States Supreme Court tried to distinguish when a vessel moved from a sperate to a desperate state “or arrives at a situation of unseaworthiness”.

You will have gathered by now that sperate has a connection to desperate.

Desperate has remained in our language, but sperate has died a lonely death, unlamented by all who knew it.

Eliezer Edwards’ dictionary of 1901 said sperate was an excellent word, although little used.

“It means to hope reasonably and is the exact opposite of desperate”, the dictionary said.

In 1755 Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, said sperable meant “such as may be hoped”.

The current edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary says sperate means “giving some hope of being paid”.

What has sperate have to do with desperate?

Johnson in his 1755 dictionary said desperate meant violent.

Then he gave an example -- “she fell desperately in love with him”. Okay, so they did things differently a few hundred years ago.

Love is blind anyway, so maybe she didn’t mean to hit him.

My big Oxford dictionary says desperate means having lost or abandoned hope.

In other words, I presume, you’ll never be paid.

They once had a television show headed Desperate Housewives.

I never watched it, but I presume they weren’t paid either.

Desperate also means despairing, or extremely violent, ready to run any risk or go to any length.

You can think of associated words, such as desperado (“a person in a desperate condition”).

I like desperacy (“beyond recovery”). I can think of a few people that this word would define.

Desperate also means having been given an assignment “that there is no hope of carrying out”.

Despair, which in some respects has taken over from sperate, means lack of hope.

Shakespeare's language was English, and “wench”is still good English, although less common than it was in Shakespeare's day.

It means a young woman.

Nowadays it might have a connotation of being low by birth or of dubious character, but it had no such connotations in Shakespeare’s day.

Far from being insulting, it was an affectionate word when used by Shakespeare.

But don’t call your wife a wench – just be on the safe side.

lauriebarber.com; lbword@midcoast.com.au.