EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (c. 1500 - c.

1800)

Great Vowel Shift | The English Renaissance | Printing Press and

Standardization | The Bible | Dictionaries and Grammars | Golden Age of
English Literature | William Shakespeare | International Trade

Great Vowel Shift

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel
Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of
which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short vowel
sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some centuries
before 1400, and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue even to this
day). Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the English vowel
shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a sudden and dramatic
shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time that English lost the purer
vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing between long and
short vowel sounds.

The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the
very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this
time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English
phenomenon, and contemporary and neighboring languages like French, German and Spanish
were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from
French and Latin.

In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long vowels were generally
pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe (e.g. sheep would
have been pronounced more like “shape”; me as “may”; mine as “meen”; shire as “sheer”; mate
as “maat”; out as “oot”; house as “hoose”; flour as “floor”; boot as “boat”; mode as “mood”;
etc). William the Conqueror’s “Domesday Book”, for example, would have been pronounced
“doomsday”, as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After the Great Vowel Shift, the
pronunciations of these and similar words would have been much more like they are spoken
today. The Shift comprises a series of connected changes, with changes in one vowel pushing
another to change in order to "keep its distance", although there is some dispute as to the order of
these movements. The changes also proceeded at different times and speeds in different parts of
the country.
Thus, Chaucer’s word lyf (pronounced “leef”) became the modern word life, and the word five
(originally pronounced “feef”) gradually acquired its modern pronunciation. Some of the
changes occurred in stages: although lyf was spelled life by the time of Shakespeare in the late
16th Century, it would have been pronounced more like “lafe” at that time, and only later did it
acquired its modern pronunciation. It should be noted, though, that the tendency of upper-classes
of southern England to pronounce a broad “a” in words like dance, bath and castle (to sound like
“dahnce”, “bahth” and “cahstle”) was merely an 18th Century fashionable affectation which
happened to stick, and nothing to do with a general shifting in vowel pronunciation.

The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and now
obscures the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts. The
spellings of some words changed to reflect the change in pronunciation (e.g. stone from stan,
rope from rap, dark from derk, barn from bern, heart from herte, etc), but most did not. In some
cases, two separate forms with different meaning continued (e.g. parson, which is the old
pronunciation of person). The effects of the vowel shift generally occurred earlier, and were
more pronounced, in the south, and some northern words like uncouth and dour still retain their
pre-vowel shift pronunciation (“uncooth” and “door” rather than “uncowth” and “dowr”). Busy
has kept its old West Midlands spelling, but an East Midlands/London pronunciation; bury has a
West Midlands spelling but a Kentish pronunciation. It is also due to irregularities and regional
variations in the vowel shift that we have ended up with inconsistencies in pronunciation such as
food (as compared to good, stood, blood, etc) and roof (which still has variable pronunciation),
and the different pronunciations of the “o” in shove, move, hove, etc.

Other changes in spelling and pronunciation also occurred during this period. The Old English
consonant X - technically a “voiceless velar fricative”, pronounced as in the “ch” of loch or Bach
- disappeared from English, and the Old English word burX (place), for example, was replaced
with “-burgh”, “-borough”, “-brough” or “-bury” in many place names. In some cases, voiceless
fricatives began to be pronounced like an “f” (e.g. laugh, cough). Many other consonants ceased
to be pronounced at all (e.g. the final “b” in words like dumb and comb; the “l” between some
vowels and consonants such as half, walk, talk and folk; the initial “k” or “g” in words like knee,
knight, gnaw and gnat; etc). As late as the 18th Century, the “r” after a vowel gradually lost its
force, although the “r” before a vowel remained unchanged (e.g. render, terror, etc), unlike in
American usage where the “r” is fully pronounced.

So, while modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English (with some difficulty
admittedly), Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the
modern ear. The English of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 16th and
early 17th Century, on the other hand, would be accented, but quite understandable, and it has
much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Even
in Shakespeare’s time, though, and probably for quite some time afterwards, short vowels were
almost interchangeable (e.g. not was often pronounced, and even written, as nat, when as whan,
etc), and the pronunciation of words like boiled as “byled”, join as “jine”, poison as “pison”,
merchant as “marchant”, certain as “sartin”, person as “parson”, heard as “hard”, speak as
“spake”, work as “wark”, etc, continued well into the 19th Century. We retain even today the old
pronunciations of a few words like derby and clerk (as “darby” and “clark”), and place names
like Berkeley and Berkshire (as “Barkley” and “Barkshire”), except in America where more
phonetic pronunciations were adopted.

The English Renaissance

Queen Elizabeth I presided over the English Renaissance

The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival of classical scholarship
known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and early 17th
Century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century), and is often
referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after the most important
monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary during this
period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of new
nationalities or any top-down decrees.

Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language of
education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages
during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking
around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the
16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent did
not exist.

Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this period, either
intact (e.g. genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium,
lens, antenna, paralysis, nausea, etc) or, more commonly, slightly altered (e.g. horrid, pathetic,
iilicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, excavate, meditate, adapt, enthusiasm,
absurdity, area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature, capsule, premium, system,
expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, fictitious, physician, anatomy,
skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript, lexicon, comedy, tragedy,
anthology, fact, biography, mythology, sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis, climax, etc). A whole
category of words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-ism” were also introduced
around this time.

Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug "lexical gaps" where no adjective
was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g. marine for sea, pedestrian for walk), or where
an existing adjective had acquired unfortunate connotations (e.g. equine or equestrian for horsey,
aquatic for watery), or merely as an additional synonym (e.g. masculine and feminine in addition
to manly and womanly, paternal in addition to fatherly, etc). Several rather ostentatious French
phrases also became naturalized in English at this juncture, including soi-disant, vis-à-vis, sang-
froid, etc, as well as more mundane French borrowings such as crêpe, étiquette, etc.

Early Modern English loans from Latin and French

Early Modern English loans from Latin & French (from Scribd, originally from T. Nevaleinen
"An Introduction to Early Modern English")

Some scholars adopted Latin terms so excessively and awkwardly at this time that the derogatory
term “inkhorn” was coined to describe pedantic writers who borrowed the classics to create
obscure and opulent terms, many of which have not survived. Examples of inkhorn terms include
revoluting, ingent, devulgate, attemptate, obtestate, fatigate, deruncinate, subsecive, nidulate,
abstergify, arreption, suppeditate, eximious, illecebrous, cohibit, dispraise and other such
inventions. Sydney Smith was one writer of the period with a particular penchant for such
inkhorn terms, including gems like frugiverous, mastigophorus, plumigerous, suspirous, anserous
and fugacious, The so-called Inkhorn Controversy was the first of several such ongoing
arguments over language use which began to erupt in the salons of England (and, later,
America). Among those strongly in favour of the use of such "foreign" terms in English were
Thomas Elyot and George Pettie; just as strongly opposed were Thomas Wilson and John Cheke.

However, it is interesting to note that some words initially branded as inkhorn terms have stayed
in the language and now remain in common use (e.g. dismiss, disagree, celebrate, encyclopaedia,
commit, industrial, affability, dexterity, superiority, external, exaggerate, extol, necessitate,
expectation, mundane, capacity and ingenious). An indication of the arbitrariness of this process
is that impede survived while its opposite, expede, did not; commit and transmit were allowed to
continue, while demit was not; and disabuse and disagree survived, while disaccustom and
disacquaint, which were coined around the same time, did not. It is also sobering to realize that
some of the greatest writers in the language have suffered from the same vagaries of fashion and
fate. Not all of Shakespeare’s many creations have stood the test of time, including barky, brisky,
conflux, exsufflicate, ungenitured, unhair, questrist, cadent, perisive, abruption, appertainments,
implausive, vastidity and tortive. Likewise, Ben Jonson’s ventositous and obstufact died a
premature death, and John Milton’s impressive inquisiturient has likewise not lasted.

There was even a self-conscious reaction to this perceived foreign incursion into the English
language, and some writers tried to deliberately resurrect older English words (e.g. gleeman for
musician, sicker for certainly, inwit for conscience, yblent for confused, etc), or to create wholly
new words from Germanic roots (e.g. endsay for conclusion, yeartide for anniversary, foresayer
for prophet, forewitr for prudence, loreless for ignorant, gainrising for resurrection, starlore for
astronomy, fleshstrings for muscles, grosswitted for stupid, speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for
ornithology, etc). Most of these were also short-lived. John Cheke even made a valiant attempt to
translate the entire "New Testament" using only native English words.

The 17th Century penchant for classical language also influenced the spelling of words like debt
and doubt, which had a silent “b” added at this time out of deference to their Latin roots
(debitum and dubitare respectively). For the same reason, island gained its silent “s”, scissors its
“c”, anchor, school and herb their “h”, people its “o” and victuals gained both a “c” and a “u”. In
the same way, Middle English perfet and verdit became perfect and verdict (the added “c” at
least being pronounced in these cases), faute and assaut became fault and assault, and aventure
became adventure. However, this perhaps laudable attempt to bring logic and reason into the
apparent chaos of the language has actually had the effect of just adding to the chaos. Its cause
was not helped by examples such the “p” which was added to the start of ptarmigan with no
etymological justification whatsoever other than the fact that the Greek word for feather, ptera,
started with a "p".

Whichever side of the debate one favours, however, it is fair to say that, by the end of the 16th
Century, English had finally become widely accepted as a language of learning, equal if not
superior to the classical languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular
literature and little else - and still criticized throughout much of Europe as crude, limited and
immature - had become recognized for its inherent qualities.
Printing Press and Standardization
The first book printed by Caxton in English was Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye by Raoul
Lefevre, translated by William Caxton in 1473

The first book printed in English was “Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye” by Raoul Lefevre,
translated by William Caxton in 1473

(from John Rylands University Library)

The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing
press, one of the world’s great technological innovations, introduced into England by William
Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around
1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton's own translation, “The
Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”, actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or early 1474. Up to
20,000 books were printed in the following 150 years, ranging from mythic tales and popular
stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, and Caxton himself became
quite rich from his printing business (among his best sellers were Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”
and Thomas Malory’s “Tales of King Arthur”). As mass-produced books became cheaper and
more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and soon works in English became even more
popular than books in Latin.

At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within England
- Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to include London),
Southern and Kentish - and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety of different
spellings. For example, the word church could be spelled in 30 different ways, people in 22,
receive in 45, she in 60 and though in an almost unbelievable 500 variations. The “-ing”
participle (e.g. running) was said as “-and” in the north, “-end” in the East Midlands, and “-ind”
in the West Midlands (e.g. runnand, runnend, runnind). The "-eth" and "-th" verb endings used in
the south of the country (e.g. goeth) appear as "-es" and "-s" in the Northern and most of the
north Midland area (e.g. goes), a version which was ultimately to become the standard.

The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard
spellings for official documents, specifying I instead of ich and various other common variants
of the first person pronoun, land instead of lond, and modern spellings of such, right, not, but,
these, any, many, can, cannot, but, shall, should, could, ought, thorough, etc, all of which
previously appeared in many variants. Chancery Standard contributed significantly to the
development of a Standard English, and the political, commercial and cultural dominance of the
"East Midlands triangle" (London-Oxford-Cambridge) was well established long before the 15th
Century, but it was the printing press that was really responsible for carrying through the
standardization process. With the advent of mass printing, the dialect and spelling of the East
Midlands (and, more specifically, that of the national capital, London, where most publishing
houses were located) became the de facto standard and, over time, spelling and grammar
gradually became more and more fixed.

Some of the decisions made by the early publishers had long-lasting repercussions for the
language. One such example is the use of the northern English they, their and them in preference
to the London equivalents hi, hir and hem (which were more easily confused with singular
pronouns like he, her and him). Caxton himself complained about the difficulties of finding
forms which would be understood throughout the country, a difficult task even for simple little
words like eggs. But his own work was far from consistent (e.g. booke and boke, axed and axyd)
and his use of double letters and the final "e" was haphazard at best (e.g. had/hadd/hadde,
dog/dogg/dogge, well/wel, which/whiche, fellow/felow/felowe/fallow/fallowe, etc). Many of his
successors were just as inconsistent, particularly as many of them were Europeans and not native
English speakers. Sometimes different spellings were used for purely practical reasons, such as
adding or omitting letters merely to help the layout or justification of printed lines.

A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has
been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic
consensus had emerged among teachers and writers. Printing also directly gave rise to another
strange quirk: the word the had been written for centuries as þe, using the thorn character of Old
English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter
“y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting in
the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is only since the
archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the "modern"
pronunciation of ye has been used.

As the Early Modern period progressed, there was an increased use of double vowels (e.g. soon)
or a silent final "e" (e.g. name) to mark long vowels, and doubled consonants to mark a
preceding short vowel (e.g. sitting), although there was much less consensus about consonants at
the end of words (e.g. bed, glad, well, glasse, etc). The letters "u" and "v", which had been more
or less interchangeable in Middle English, gradually became established as a vowel and a
consonant respectively, as did "i" and "j". Also during the 16th Century, the virgule (an oblique
stroke /), which had been a very common mark of punctuation in Middle English, was largely
replaced by the comma; the period or full-stop was restricted to the end of sentences; semi-
colons began to be used in additon to colons (although the rules for their use were still unclear);
quotation marks were used to mark direct speech; and capital letters were used at the start of
sentences and for proper names and important nouns. The grammarian John Hart was
particularly influential in these punctuation reforms.

Standardization was well under way by around 1650, but it was a slow and halting process and
names in particular were often rendered in a variety of ways. For example, more than 80
different spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been recorded, and he himself spelled it
differently in each of his six known signatures, including two different versions in his own will!

The Bible
(From Spelling Thee, You and I)

Two particularly influential milestones in English literature were published in the 16th and early
17th Century. In 1549, the “Book of Common Prayer” (a translation of the Church liturgy in
English, substantially revised in 1662) was introduced into English churches, followed in 1611
by the Authorized, or King James, Version of “The Bible”, the culmination of more than two
centuries of efforts to produce a Bible in the native language of the people of England.

As we saw in the previous section, John Wycliffe had made the first English translation of “The
Bible” as early as 1384, and illicit handwritten copies had been circulating ever since. But, in
1526, William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the
original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale printed his “Bible” in secrecy in Germany, and smuggled
them into his homeland, for which he was hounded down, found guilty of heresy and executed in
1536. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others
carried on his labours.

Tyndale’s “Bible” was much clearer and more poetic than Wycliffe’s early version. In addition
to completely new English words like fisherman, landlady, scapegoat, taskmaster, viper, sea-
shore, zealous, beautiful, clear-eyed, broken-hearted and many others, it includes many of the
well-known phrases later used in the King James Version, such as let there be light, my brother’s
keeper, the powers that be, fight the good fight, the apple of mine eye, flowing with milk and
honey, the fat of the land, am I my brother’s keeper?, sign of the times, ye of little faith, eat drink
and be merry, salt of the earth, a man after his own heart, sick unto death, the spirit is willing but
the flesh is weak, a stranger in a strange land, let my people go, a law unto themselves, etc.
Ironically, a scant few years after Tyndale’s execution, Henry VIII’s split with Roman
Catholicism completely changed official attitudes to an English “Bible”, and by 1539 the idea
was being wholeheartedly encouraged, and several new English language Bibles were published
(including the “Coverdale Bible”, the “Matthew Bible”, the “Great Bible”, the “Geneva Bible”,
the “Bishops Bible”, etc).

The “King James Bible” was compiled by a committee of 54 scholars and clerics, and published
in 1611, in an attempt to standardize the plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up over the
preceding 70 years. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking, both in its
vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely fallen out of
use, or were at least in the process of dying out (e.g. digged for dug, gat and gotten for got, bare
for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, holpen for helped, wist for knew, etc), and several
archaic forms such as brethren, kine and twain. The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third
person singular verbs, even though "-es" was becoming much more common by the early 17th
Century, and ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common you.

Dictionaries and Grammars

The first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall”, was published by English schoolteacher
Robert Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first
French dictionary, although admittedly some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and
nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey’s little book contained 2,543 of what he
called “hard words”, especially those borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, although
it was not actually a very reliable resource (even the word words was spelled in two different
ways on the title page alone, as wordes and words).

Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed
during the 17th and 18th Century. The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English language
was “An Universall Etymological English Dictionary”, compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721
(the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).

But the first dictionary considered anything like reliable was Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of
the English Language”, published in 1755, over 150 years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive
academic achievement in its own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word dictionary remained the pre-
eminent English dictionary until the much more comprehensive “Oxford English Dictionary”
150 more years later, although it was actually riddled with inconsistencies in both spelling and
definitions. Johnson’s dictionary included many flagrant examples of inkhorn terms which have
not survived, including digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, denominable,
opiniatry, ariolation, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy, disubitary, esurine, estuation, indignate and
others. Johnson also deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or
considered vulgar (including bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby and touchy), but these useful
words have clearly survived intact regardless of his opinions. Several of his definitions appear
deliberately jokey or politically motivated.

Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what was
increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language, including John Cheke's 1569 proposal for the
removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar's 1580 recommendation of a new 37-letter
alphabet (including 8 vowels, 4 "half-vowels" and 25 consonants) in order to aid and simplify
spelling. There were even attempts (similarly unsuccessful) to ban certain words or phrases that
were considered in some way undesirable, words such as fib, banter, bigot, fop, flippant, flimsy,
workmanship, selfsame, despoil, nowadays, furthermore and wherewithal, and phrases such as
subject matter, drive a bargain, handle a subject and bolster an argument.

But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English
language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. Jonathan Swift, in his “Proposal
for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” of 1712, decried the
“degeneration” of English and sought to “purify” it and fix it forever in unchanging form, calling
for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the Académie Française.
He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but such
an institution was never actually realized. (Interestingly, the only country ever to set up an
Academy for the English language was South Africa, in 1961).

In the wake of Johnson’s “Dictionary”, a plethora (one could even say a surfeit) of other
dictionaries appeared, peaking in the period between 1840 and 1860, as well as many specialized
dictionaries and glossaries. Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist, and looked to
regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling. His book “British
Education”, published in 1756, and unashamedly aimed at cultured British society, particularly
cultured Scottish society, purported to set the correct pronunciation of the English language, and
it was both influential and popular. His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later gave us the
unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. Malaprop.
In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to appear in the 18th Century, the
best-known and most influential of which were Robert Lowth's “A Short Introduction to English
Grammar” (1762) and Lindley Murray's “English Grammar” (1794). In fact, some 200 works on
grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and no less than 800 during the
19th Century. Most of these works, Lowth’s in particular, were extremely prescriptive, stating in
no uncertain terms the “correct” way of using English. Lowth was the main source of such
"correct" grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive, never end a sentence with
a preposition and never split an infinitive. A refreshing exception to such prescriptivism was the
“Rudiments of English Grammar” by the scientist and polymath Joseph Priestley, which was
unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by common usage and not prescribed by
self-styled grammarians.

The first English newspaper was the “Courante” or “Weekly News” (actually published in
Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in force in England at that time) arrived in 1622,
and the first professional newspaper of public record was the “London Gazette”, which began
publishing in 1665. The first daily, “The Daily Courant”, followed in 1702, and “The Times” of
London published its first edition in 1790, around the same time as the influential periodicals
“The Tatler” and “The Spectator”, which between them did much to establish the style of
English in this period.

Golden Age of English Literature

All languages tend to go through phases of intense generative activity, during which many new
words are added to the language. One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern
period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English
Literature (other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century,
and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today).
Between 1500 and 1650, an estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about half of
which are still in use today.

Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not
considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac
Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and,
even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then
translated them into English. Sir Francis Bacon, however, hedged his bets and wrote many of his
works in both Latin and English and, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek, coined several
scientific words such as thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia. In 1704, Newton,
having written in Latin until that time, chose to write his “Opticks” in English, introducing in the
process such words as lens, refraction, etc. Over time, the rise of nationalism led to the increased
use of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium of intellectual
communication.

Thomas Wyatt’s experimentation with different poetical forms during the early 16th Century,
and particularly his introduction of the sonnet from Europe, ensured that poetry would became
the proving ground for several generations of English writers during a golden age of English
literature, and Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Dryden,
Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and many other rose to the challenge. Important English
playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and
of course Shakespeare.

The English scholar and classicist Sir Thomas Elyot went out of his way to find new words, and
gave us words like animate, describe, dedicate, esteem, maturity, exhaust and modesty in the
early 16th Century. His near contemporary Sir Thomas More contributed absurdity, active,
communicate, education, utopia, acceptance, exact, explain, exaggerate and others, largely from
Latin roots. Milton was responsible for an estimated 630 word coinages, including lovelorn,
fragrance and pandemonium. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is also credited with
the introduction of many common words, including damp, defunct, strenuous, clumsy and others;
John Donne gave us self-preservation, valediction and others; and to Sir Philip Sydney are
attributed bugbear, miniature, eye-pleasing, dumb-stricken, far-fetched and conversation in its
modern meaning.

It was really only in the 17th Century that dialects (or at least divergence from the fashionable
Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey) began to be considered uncouth and an indication of
inferior class. However, such dialects provided good comic material for the burgeoning theatre
industry (a well-known example being the “rude mechanicals” of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer
Night’s Dream”) and, paradoxically, many dialect words were introduced into general usage in
that way. The word class itself only acquired its modern sociological meaning in the early 18th
Century, but by the end of the century it had become all-pervasive, to the extent that the mere
sound of a Cockney accent was enough to brand the speaker as a vagabond, thief or criminal
(although in the 19th Century, Charles Dickens was to produce great literature and sly humour
out of just such preconceptions, explicitly using speech, vocabulary and accent for commic
effect).
William Shakespeare
A page from Hamlet, from Shakespeare's First Folio

Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, it is clear that one man,
William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant extent in
the late 16th and early 17th Century. Skakespeare took advantage of the relative freedom and
flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free and easy with the
already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and
substantives - an early instance of the “verbification” of nouns which modern language purists
often decry - in phrases such as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods Herod”, dog them at the heels,
the good Brutus ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it well”, “uncle me no uncle”, etc.

He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and he personally coined an estimated
2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works, including, but by no means limited to, bare-
faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled,
homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lack-lustre, bump,
cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded, laughable,
dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint,
hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy, and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today.
By some counts, almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a
truly remarkable achievement (it is the equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a few
short phrases, another other new word here). However, not all of these were necessarily
personally invented by Shakespeare himself: they merely appear for the first time in his
published works, and he was more than happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and
local dialect words, and to mine the latest fashions and fads for new ideas.

He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as one fell swoop, vanish into
thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed lovers, as
luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s the rub, to the
manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it's Greek to me, a tower of
strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated breath, more in sorrow
than in anger, truth will out, cold comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s paradise and flesh and
blood, among many others.

By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern,
and English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system, although to be was still commonly
used as the auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g. I am come rather than I have
come). Do was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g. say you so? or do
you say so?). Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to use
clomb as well as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well as shaved, digged as well as
dug, etc. Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old English to just two, “-s” and “-en”,
and again Shakespeare sometimes used one and sometimes the other. The old verb ending “-en”
had in general been gradually replaced by “-eth” (e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc), although this was
itself in the process of being replaced by the northern English verb ending “-es”, and
Shakespeare used both (e.g. loves and loveth, but not the old loven). Even over the period of
Shakespeare’s output there was a noticeable change, with “-eth” endings outnumbering “-es” by
over 3 to 1 during the early period from 1591-1599, and “-es” outnumbering “-eth” by over 6 to
1 during 1600-1613.

International Trade
While all these important developments were underway, British naval superiority was also
growing. In the 16th and 17th Century, international trade expanded immensely, and loanwords
were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world, including those
of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Among these
were:

French (e.g. bizarre, ballet, sachet, crew, progress, chocolate, salon, duel, brigade, infantry,
comrade, volunteer, detail, passport, explorer, ticket, machine, cuisine, prestige, garage, shock,
moustache, vogue);

Italian (e.g. carnival, fiasco, arsenal, casino, miniature, design, bankrupt, grotto, studio, umbrella,
rocket, ballot, balcony, macaroni, piano, opera, violin);

Spanish (e.g. armada, bravado, cork, barricade, cannibal);

Portuguese (e.g. breeze, tank, fetish, marmalade, molasses);

German (e.g. kindergarten, noodle, bum, dumb, dollar, muffin, hex, wanderlust, gimmick, waltz,
seminar, ouch!);

Dutch/Flemish ( e.g. bale, spool, stripe, holster, skipper, dam, booze, fucking, crap, bugger,
hunk, poll, scrap, curl, scum, knapsack, sketch, landscape, easel, smuggle, caboose, yacht, cruise,
dock, buoy, keelhaul, reef, bluff, freight, leak, snoop, spook, sleigh, brick, pump, boss, lottery);

Basque (e.g. bizarre, anchovy);

Norwegian (e.g. maelstrom, iceberg, ski, slalom, troll);

Icelandic (e.g. mumps, saga, geyser);

Finnish (e.g. sauna);

Persian (e.g. shawl, lemon, caravan, bazaar, tambourine);

Arabic (e.g. harem, jar, magazine, algebra, algorithm, almanac, alchemy, zenith, admiral,
sherbet, saffron, coffee, alcohol, mattress, syrup, hazard, lute);