Revealed: The common words that used to have VERY different meanings - including 'meat', 'flirt, and 'pink'

If scientists had a time machine, having a conversation with a Brit from even just 250 years ago could be very confusing. Although they'd be speaking the same language as us, the meaning of many English words have dramatically changed. In fact, the mention of things like'fudge', 'meat', 'pink', 'stripe', 'flirt' and'artificial' in a certain context could send our 18th century ancestors into a muddle. Lynne Cahill, a linguistics professor at the University of Sussex, said some words change their meanings and others don't because'there are lots of things going on'. 'As our lives change, we need words for different things, so some meanings go out of use (think of different types of horse-drawn carriage) and new ones come in (think of technology, like mobile phones and computers),' she told MailOnline. 'Languages deal with these things in different ways, sometimes using existing words with related meanings to refer to new things.' MailOnline has scoured the historical records and dictionaries to find more than 40 words that once had a very different definition.