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I see this as "well kept", sometimes hyphenated. Google n-grams suggests "well kempt" drifted into popularity since 2000 or so, with insignificant use before th
by dmurray 5y ago
I see this as "well kept", sometimes hyphenated. Google n-grams suggests "well kempt" drifted into popularity since 2000 or so, with insignificant use before that.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Well+kept%2C+well+kempt&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Well+kept%2C+w...
- perl4ever 5y agoI was wondering what kind of usage "well kempt" had before 2000, and one of the examples in Google books is William Safire writing about writing, where he mentions "wellkempt" in Ulysses and says that in the 16th century, "kempt" divided into "ill kempt" and "well kempt". It goes on to say that "a thousand years ago, couth meant 'known, familiar' and uncouth meant 'unknown, foreign, strange'...[c]outh faded out but was back-formed and born again".