The current dictionary definition of the word accost is “to approach boldly.”

So reporters might accost a movie star, or unhappy shareholders accost the chairman of some corporation.

Some of the dictionaries include a definition of “propositioning” so that a man making a sexual advance to a woman might be accosting her.

These dictionary definitions have a sense of verbal approach, so that the person doing the accosting isn’t seen to actually physically interact their target.

But I think in popular usage accost has come, to some extent, to mean “attack.”  There’s a headline from the New York Times

“Six Teenagers Accost 2 Men, Killing One.”

It describes a knife attack.

So this word accost is a live one, changing meaning under our very noses.  Knife attacks are more aggressive than paparazzi but looking back at the evolution of the word accost, its history is even less belligerent.  It seems to be getting more violent as time goes on.

One of the early appearances of accost in English is in the famous poem The Faerie Queene by Edmond Spenser from 1596.  There Spenser has the shore accosting the sea.

If it were the other way round—the sea accosting the shore—you might still think that the meaning has some sense of “attack” to it.  But in fact the meaning was simply that the shore was “lying alongside” the sea since the French word that Spenser was borrowing accoster meant “to be side to side.”

Since he conveniently refers to the seashore, it’s even easer for me to draw your attention to the word coast; a word related to accost and still meaning “the seaside” to us today.

Most of the meanings of accost listed in the Oxford English Dictionary arose within a few decades either side of 1600, so right around Shakespeare’s lifetime.

The naval meaning of coming alongside another ship seemed to drop away over time in favor of a more personal meaning of getting close to someone for any purpose, friendly or otherwise.

The first thing you do when you get close to someone is talk to them, and this meaning shows up pretty soon afterward.

It is only about 120 years ago that we have accost referring to sexual advances; presumably unwanted.

I’d have to suppose that this would coincide with accost becoming more strictly “aggressive talk”; all meanings of pleasant greetings having fallen away.

Going back again to the French, it of course came from Latin and both the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary connect this meaning of “side” to the bones you have in your side; your ribs.  The American Heritage Dictionary goes even further and points back to an Indo-European root kost meaning “bone” and suggesting the ost as in osteoporosis may have evolved from this root as well.

Osteoporosis is a malady in which people’s bones lose density and become more prone to fracture.  Knowing ost means “bone,” the word explains itself as having too many pores in your bones.

Let me recap the trajectory of this root.

• Bone to rib;
• rib to side;
• side to beside;
• beside to approach;
• approach to talk;
• talk to talk assertively;
• talk assertively to attack.

Edmond Spenser’s sense of “lying beside” makes it accurate to say that he accosted Geoffrey Chaucer since both of them were buried in Westminster Cathedral.

Along with Spenser’s ribs and other bones lie a bunch of quills, because when he was laid to rest his admirers wrote poems of farewell to him and pitched them—and the pens they were written with—into Spenser’s grave before it was sealed.