The English language’s wild century

And those who tried to resist it

Folk scene – king among peasants (circa 1900), Włodzimierz Tetmajer

How many words are there in the English language?

Given that we can’t even define “word” in a way that every linguist will accept, we have to face the sad truth that we’ll never be able to count them exactly.

To do so, there are too many questions we’d need to answer first: Are idioms like kick the bucket words? Do we count words that are obsolete? What about scientific terms? Do different senses of a word (e.g. as a noun vs an adjective) count as different words?

Even if we might disagree about what should count as an English word, there’s one thing we can all agree on: there are an awful lot of English words.

Hundreds of thousands of them, by any estimation: The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, for instance, has 273,000. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 470,000. Wiktionary reports over 800,000!¹ Whichever count you accept, it’s a staggeringly huge number.²

It wasn’t always this way. The Dictionary of Old English, for instance, whose noble goal is to define every English word used between the years AD 600–1150, will — when it’s finished — contain around 35,000 words.³

So, somewhere along the way, English got big.

And it happened in the blink of an eye, from the perspective of the lifespan of the language: in just 130 years, English vocabulary ballooned in size as the language was transformed by a profusion of new words, most of them borrowed from other languages, mainly Latin (e.g. expect, attempt). Others were coined by stitching together parts of native English words (e.g. farmhouse, cold-hearted).

During the decades between 1530–1660, the latter part of the English Renaissance, English somehow became the gargantuan, hybrid beast that it is today.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, the beast that is English came out of an era of intense experimentation.

It was a period in the history of English comparable to the Cambrian Explosion in the history of life, when a bewildering variety of forms flourished for just a short while.

In the end, not all survived. But what happened in this short period made English the language it is today, and gives us a fascinating glimpse of what might have been.

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You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

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It wasn’t all Shakespeare

The period of English’s greatest expansion extended a few decades in either direction beyond the lifespan of the most famous coiner of new words, William Shakespeare (1564–1616).

But Shakespeare, at least in his career as an expander of English vocabulary, was exceptional only in terms of the success his coinages saw.⁴ He was far from the only prolific wordsmith of his day: his was an age of great creativity in forming words, and many writers took part.

It was also an age of great controversy, as you might expect when language changes rapidly: on one side were those who busied themselves with attempts to smuggle in every Latin word they found in the dictionary, and on the other were those who wanted to keep English pure of these strange-sounding novelties.

Neither side entirely had their way, but, on balance, the victor was clear: the English language was to be, in large part, Latin in character forever more. For evidence, I’ll list for you some of the words I’ve used in this article — none particularly technical — along with their date of first appearance in the English language:⁵

• creativity (1659)

• exactly (1531), originally with the meaning ‘perfectly’; the meaning ‘precisely’ is first attested in 1662

• idiom (1573)

• obsolete (1579)

• scientific (1589), originally with the meaning ‘concerning a liberal education’; the current meaning is first attested in 1637

• vocabulary (1532)

• profusion (1545)

• career (1550)

• prolific (1635)

• expect (1535)

• rapidly (1653)

• attempt (1548)

• technical (1617)

All of these new Renaissance coinages either have their origins in Latin, or, like idiom or technical, they come from Greek, mediated through Latin.

This infusion of Latin words reshaped the feel of English, to the point where only 25% of modern English vocabulary today has its origins in the Germanic roots of the language.⁶

But we only see the new words that survived. Many of the coinages which came out of the period 1530–1660 never caught on. If they did, the language would look very different: in fact, much of the remaining Germanic character of English would have been lost, swept away by a tidal wave of Latin and Greek derivatives.

We’ll never know just how close we came to losing dead in favour of lethed, or what twist of fate would have had us saying tenebrous instead of dark, or robustious instead of strong.

But we can try to understand why English writers turned just so robustiously to Latin in this period if we look at what else was going on at the time.

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Romanes eunt domus!

This was, after all, the time of the Renaissance: a rebirth of classical learning. Latin was made a part of the English grammar school curriculum, to be learned even by boys of the middle classes.

If you had been thoroughly schooled in the classics and the Latin language throughout your youth, your writing as an adult — even in English — would bear evidence of it.

When English didn’t seem to have the exact right word for what you meant, you might slip in the Latin word, perhaps anglicized a little so it didn’t stick out so much. And if you were writing for educated people, you knew that your readers would understand what you meant.

But there was another factor favouring the growth of English vocabulary, beyond the increasing visibility of Latin in England: the growth of English into a standard language.

The process by which a language becomes a standard has two components.

First, the language becomes internally homogeneous: the idea emerges that there is a single correct way of speaking and writing, and any deviation from this standard is considered inferior. This is the aspect that most people first think of when they consider standardization.

But there is another aspect. As a language becomes a standard, it becomes used in more domains of life. As the language’s prestige grows, it becomes used in law, science, government, religion, philosophy and literature in addition to casual conversation and the business of the household.

This is what happened to English, beginning in the 14th century. While English had always been in use as a spoken language through the Middle Ages, it was not used in official contexts for centuries after the Norman Conquest (1066).

Legal affairs and the business of government administration were conducted in French. The Church used Latin, as did learned men who discussed technical subjects such as medicine and philosophy.

But the law opened up to English in 1362 with the Pleading in English Act. Guilds began to use English for record-keeping in the early 15th century (the Brewers were the first), and government followed suit soon after. Gradually, English became a language which could be used for anything and everything.

But the English language, after centuries out of the halls of power, didn’t have the vocabulary to be used for all of its new jobs.

As a result of its greatly expanded role, English needed new words, and quickly. When English words were needed for a new domain, borrowing the words from the language previously used in that domain was often the logical choice.

To take an example from before the period we’ve been discussing today, if there were a French word used for a particular legal concept, such as defendant (attested before 1325), that word could be used in English, often with some rejigging of the pronunciation.

Many of the French-derived words in English came into the language before the Renaissance, however, because the domains previously occupied by French (that is, law and government) were opened up in the late Middle Ages: the 14th and 15th centuries.

In our period (1530–1660), it was Latin’s turn to supply the words. And the words came flooding in. They came from the technical fields of medicine, philosophy, and theology, which were suddenly being written in English for the first time. The new use of English in these realms previously reserved for Latin gave us, for example, words like circulation (1576),⁷ objective (1620 in its modern meaning), and propitiate (1583).

There’s an irony here: the Renaissance was a rediscovery of the classical period and a renewal of interest in the Latin language, and it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the high point of Latin influence on the English language.

And yet, it also ushered in an age where Latin receded from more and more domains of life, as English began to take over more of the roles Latin once played as the language of educated people.

At the outset, however, in the 16th century, writers still felt a need to justify writing in English, as did Roger Ascham (1515–1568), perhaps most famous as Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, in the preface to his archery manual Toxophilus (1545):

And althoughe to have written this boke either in latin or Greke… had bene more easier & fit for mi trade in study, yet neverthelesse, I supposinge it no point of honestie, that mi commodite (convenience) should stop & hinder ani parte either of the pleasure or profite of manie, have written this Englishe matter in the Englishe tongue, for Englishe men.

Ascham and many of his contemporaries wrote both in Latin and in English (and some of them also in Greek!). When writing in Latin, they aimed to imitate Cicero’s style directly. But they also sought to preserve Cicero’s spirit even in their English writing.

This led to another irony: it was their great love of Cicero that made them resistant to the wholesale import of Latin words into the English language.

One characteristic of Cicero’s writing was a resistance to what he saw as the fashionable use of Greek words in Latin, which he saw as originating in a lack of pride for the Latin language. In the man’s own words (well, via a translator):

I can never cease wondering what can be the origin of the exaggerated contempt for home products that is now fashionable. It would of course be out of place to attempt to prove it here, but in my opinion, as I have often argued, the Latin language, so far from having a poor vocabulary, as is commonly supposed, is actually richer than the Greek. (De Finibus; Rackham 1931, tr.)

Cicero was, in fact, a major innovator in the Latin language, coming up with Latin versions of more than a hundred Greek philosophical terms. Some of Cicero’s coinages remain with us in English today: evidence, quality, quantity, humanity from evidentia, qualitas, quantitas, humanitas.⁸

Cicero’s English admirers — including not only Ascham but also Thomas Wilson (1524–1581) and John Cheke (1514–1567), whom we’ve met before — found themselves in a similar position to their hero, with one ironic difference: now the fashionable foreign language threatening to stamp out the genius of their native language was none other than Latin, the language Cicero had worked so hard to defend in his day against incursions from Greek.

Other writers were not so hesitant.

Whether the words were to come from English or Latin, everyone seemed to agree: English needed more words if it were to become one of the great languages of the world.

But the devil was in the details. And in answering the question, “Where should the new words come from?”, one the great controversies in the history of the English language began.