Fifteen centuries of English cannot easily be summarized, but this brief account may afford some perspective to the information given in a dictionary, and help to make more sense of the strange and often unpredictable ways in which words seem to behave.

Origins

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, a vast group with many branches, thought to be derived from a common ancestor-language called Proto-Indo-European. The words we use in English are derived from a wide range of sources, mostly within this family. The earliest sources are Germanic, Norse, and Romanic; more recently, with the growth and decline of the British Empire and the rapid development of communications, they have been worldwide.

It is difficult to be sure exactly what we mean by an 'English' word. Most obviously, words are English if they can be traced back to the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons, who settled in Britain from the fifth century. From this time are derived many common words such as eat, drink, speak, work, house, door, man, woman, husband, wife. The Anglo-Saxons displaced the Celtic peoples, whose speech survives in Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish. Little Celtic influence remains in English, except in names of places and rivers.

Anglo-Saxon Britain continued to have contact with the Roman Empire, of which Britain had formerly been a part, and with Latin, which was the official language throughout the Empire and survived as a language of ritual (and for a time also of learning and communication) in the Western Christian Church. After the mission of St Augustine in ad 597, the Christianized Anglo-Saxons built churches and monasteries, and there were considerable advances in art and learning. At this time English was enriched by many words from Latin, some of which are still in use, such as angel, disciple, martyr, and shrine. Other words were derived from Latin via the Germanic languages, for example copper, mint (in the sense of coinage), pound, sack, and tile, and others were ultimately of oriental origin, for example camel and pepper.

The next important influence on the vocabulary of English was the Old Norse language of the Danish and other Scandinavian invaders of the ninth and tenth centuries, collectively called Vikings. They occupied much of the east side of England, and under Cnut (Canute) ruled the whole country for a time. Because Old Norse was also a Germanic language (of a different branch from English) many words were similar to the Anglo-Saxon ones, and it is difficult to establish the extent of the Old Norse influence. However, a number of Norse words are identifiable and are still in use, such as call, take, and law, names of parts of the body such as leg, and other basic words such as egg, root, and window. Many more Norse words are preserved in some dialects of the east side of England, and especially in place names.

In the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, King Alfred (871-99) and his successors did much to keep English alive by using it (rather than Latin) as the language of education and learning; by the tenth century there was a considerable amount of English prose and verse literature. Saxon and Danish kingdoms existed side by side for several generations, and there was much linguistic interaction. One very important effect on English was the gradual disappearance of many word-endings, or inflections, leading to a simpler grammar. This was partly because the stems of English and Norse words were often very close in form (for example, stan and steinn, meaning 'stone'), and only the inflections differed as an impediment to mutual understanding. So forms such as staane, staanes, etc., began to be simplified and, eventually, eliminated. The process continued for hundreds of years into Middle English.

The Norman Conquest

In 1066 William of Normandy was crowned King of England. The arrival of the French-speaking Normans as a ruling nobility brought a transforming influence on the language. French, as one of the Romance languages, has its roots in the spoken or 'vulgar' Latin that continued in use until about ad 600. For two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, French (in its regional Norman form) was the language of the aristocracy, the lawcourts, and the Church hierarchy in England. During these years many French words were adopted into English. Some were connected with law and government, such as justice, council, and tax, and some were abstract terms such as liberty, charity, and conflict. The Normans also had an important effect on the spelling of English words. The combination of letters cw-, for example, was standardized in the Norman manner to qu-, so that cwen became queen and cwic became quik (later quick).

This mixture of conquering peoples and their languages—Germanic, Scandinavian, and Romance—has had a decisive effect on the forms of words in modern English. The three elements make up the basic stock of English vocabulary, and different practices of putting sounds into writing are reflected in each. The different grammatical characteristics of each element can be seen in the structure and endings of many words. Many of the variable endings such as -ant and -ent, -er and -or, -able and -ible exist because the Latin words on which they are based belonged to different classes of verbs and nouns, each of which had a different ending. For example, important comes from the Latin verb portare, meaning 'to carry' (which belongs to one class or conjugation) while repellent comes from the Latin verb pellere, meaning 'to drive' (which belongs to another). Capable comes from a Latin word ending in -abilis, while sensible comes from one ending in -ibilis, and so on.

Middle English

Middle English, as the English of c.1100–1500 is called, emerged as the spoken and written form of the language under these influences. By the reign of Henry II (1154–89) many of the aristocracy spoke English and the use of French diminished, especially after King John (1199–1216) lost possession of Normandy in 1204. Many Anglo-Saxon words had disappeared altogether: for example, niman was replaced by the Old Norse (Scandinavian) taka (meaning 'take'), and the Old English sige was replaced by a word derived from Old French, victory. Other Old English words that disappeared are adl (disease), lof (praise), and lyft (air: compare German Luft).

Hundreds of the Romance words were short simple words that would now be distinguished with difficulty from Old English words if their origin were not known: for example, bar, cry, fool, mean, pity, stuff, touch, and tender. Sometimes new and old words continued in use side by side, in some cases on a roughly equal footing and in others with a distinction in meaning (as with doom and judgement, and stench and smell). This has produced pairs of words which are both in use today, such as shut and close, and buy and purchase, in which the second word of each pair is Romance in origin and often more formal in connotation. This mixture of types of words is a feature especially of modern English. For many meanings we now have a choice of less formal or more formal words, the more formal ones in some cases being used only in very specific circumstances. For example, the word vendor is used instead of seller only in the context of buying or selling property. Many technical words derived from or ultimately from Latin, such as estop and usucaption, survive only in legal contexts, to the great confusion of the layman.

Printing

There was much regional variation in the spelling and pronunciation of Middle English, although a good measure of uniformity was imposed by the development of printing from the fifteenth century. This uniformity was based as much on practical considerations of the printing process as on what seemed most 'correct' or suitable. It became common practice, for example, to add a final e to words to fill a line of print. The printers—many of whom were foreign—used rules from their own languages, especially Dutch and Flemish, when setting English into type. William Caxton, the first English printer (1422–91), exercised an important but not always beneficial influence. The unnecessary insertion of h in ghost, for example, is due to Caxton (who learned the business of printing on the Continent), and the change had its effect on other words such as ghastly and (perhaps) ghetto. In general, Caxton used the form of English prevalent in the south-east of England, although the East Midland dialect was the more extensive. This choice, together with the growing importance of London as the English capital, gave the dialect of the South-East a special importance that survives to the present day.

Pronunciation

At roughly the same time as the early development of printing, the pronunciation of English was also undergoing major changes. The main change, which began in the fourteenth century during the lifetime of the poet Chaucer, was in the pronunciation of vowel sounds. The so-called 'great vowel shift' resulted in the reduction of the number of long vowels (for example, in deed as distinct from dead) from seven to the five which we know today (discernible in the words bean, barn, born, boon, and burn). It also affected the pronunciation of other vowels: the word life, for example, was once pronounced as we now pronounce leaf, and name was pronounced as two syllables to rhyme with farmer. In many cases, as with name, the form of the word did not change, and this accounts for many of the 'silent' vowels at the ends of words. The result of these developments was a growing difference between what was spoken and what was written.

The Renaissance

The rediscovery in Europe of the culture and history of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds exercised a further romanizing influence on English which blossomed in the Renaissance of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Scholarship flourished, and the language used by scholars and writers was Latin. During the Renaissance, words such as arena, dexterity, excision, genius, habitual, malignant, specimen, and stimulus came into use in English. They are familiar and useful words but their Latin origins sometimes make them awkward to handle, as, for example, when we use arena, genius, and stimulus in the plural. There was also a tendency in the Renaissance to try to emphasize the Greek or Latin origins of words when writing them. This accounts for the b in debt (the earlier English word was det; in Latin it is debitum), and l in fault (earlier faut; the Latin source is fallere fail), the s in isle (earlier ile; insula in Latin), and the p in receipt (earlier receit; recepta in Latin). Some words that had gone out of use were reintroduced, usually with changed meanings, for example artificial, disc (originally the same as dish), and fastidious.

Later influences

The development of technology from the eighteenth century onwards has also played a part in continuing the influence of Latin. New technical terms have come into use, formed on Latin or Greek source-words because these can convey precise ideas in easily combinable forms, for example bacteriology, microscope, radioactive, and semiconductor. Combinations of Germanic elements are also used, as in software, splashdown, and take-off. This process has sometimes produced odd mixtures, such as television, which is half Greek and half Latin, and microchip, which is half Greek and half Germanic.

In recent times English speakers have come into contact with people from other parts of the world, through trade, colonization, and improved communications. This contact has produced a rich supply of new words that are often strange in form. India, where the British first had major dealings in the seventeenth century, is the source of words such bungalow, jodhpurs, and khaki. Usually these words have been altered or assimilated to make them look more natural in English (e.g. bungalow from Gujarati bangalo). Examples from other parts of the world are harem and mufti (from Arabic), bazaar (from Persian), kiosk (from Turkish), and anorak (from Eskimo). From European countries we have acquired balcony (from Italian), envelope (from French), and yacht (from Dutch).

Thousands of such words, though not English in the Germanic sense, are regarded as fully absorbed into English. In addition, many words and phrases are used in English contexts but are generally regarded as 'foreign', and are conventionally printed in italics to distinguish them when used in an English context. Very many of these are French, for example accouchement (childbirth), bagarre (a scuffle), chanson (a French song), flânerie (idleness), and rangé (domesticated), but other languages are represented, as with echt (genuine) and Machtpolitik (power politics) from German, and mañana (tomorrow) from Spanish (see also Italicization).

Usage often recognizes the difficulties of absorbing words from various sources by assimilating them into forms that are already familiar. The word picturesque which came into use in the eighteenth century, is a compromise between its French source pittoresque and the existing Middle English word picture, to which it is obviously related. The English word cockroach is a conversion of the Spanish word cucaracha into a pair of familiar words cock (a bird) and roach (a fish). Cockroaches have nothing to do with cocks or roaches, and the association is simply a matter of linguistic convenience.

Problems of inflection arise with words taken from other languages. The ending -i in particular is very unnatural in English, and usage varies between -is and -ies in the plural. A similar difficulty occurs with the many adopted nouns ending in -o, some of which come from Italian (solo), some from Spanish (armadillo), and some from Latin (hero); here usage varies between -os and -oes. Verbs often need special treatment, as for example bivouac (from French, and before that probably from Swiss German) which needs a k in the past tense (bivouacked, not bivouaced which might be mispronounced), and ski (from Norwegian) where the past form skied is not really satisfactory, and ski'd was once popular as an alternative. In this dictionary extensive help is given with these and other difficulties of inflection.

Dictionaries

One obvious consequence of the development of printing in the fifteenth century was that it allowed the language to be recorded in glossaries and dictionaries, and this might be expected to have had a considerable effect on the way words were used and spelt. However, listing all the words in the language systematically in alphabetical order with their spellings and meanings is a relatively recent idea. In 1580, when Shakespeare was sixteen, a schoolmaster named William Bullokar published a manual for the 'ease, speed, and perfect reading and writing of English', and he called for the writing of an English dictionary. Such a dictionary, the work of Robert Cawdrey (another schoolmaster), was not published until 1604. Like the dictionaries that followed in quick succession (including Bullokar's own English Expositor), its purpose was described as being for the understanding of 'hard words'. It was not until the eighteenth century that dictionaries systematically listed all the words in general use at the time regardless of how 'easy' or 'hard' they were; the most notable of these were compiled by Nathaniel Bailey (1721) and, especially, Samuel Johnson (1755). They were partly a response to a call, expressed by Swift, Pope, Addison, and other writers, for the language to be fixed and stabilized, and for the establishment of an English Academy to monitor it. None of these hopes as such were realized, but the dictionaries played an important role in settling the form and senses of English words.

The systematic investigation and recording of words in all their aspects and on a historical basis is first and exclusively represented in the Oxford English Dictionary, begun by the Scottish schoolmaster James A. H. Murray in 1879. This describes historically the spelling, inflection, origin, and meaning of words, and is supported by citations from printed literature and other sources as evidence from Old English to the present day. To take account of more recent changes and developments in the language, a four-volume Supplement was added to the work from 1972 to 1986, and a new edition integrating the original dictionary and its Supplement appeared in 1989. Because of its depth of scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary forms a major basis of all English dictionaries produced since. Smaller concise and other household dictionaries that aim at recording the main vocabulary in current use began to appear early this century and in recent years the number has grown remarkably.

Dictionaries of current English, as distinct from historical dictionaries, generally record the language as it is being used at the time, and with usage constantly changing the distinction between 'right' and 'wrong' is sometimes difficult to establish. Unlike French, which is guided by the rulings of the Académie française, English is not monitored by any single authority; established usage is the principal criterion. One result of this is that English tolerates many more alternative spellings than other languages. The alternatives are based on certain patterns of word formation and variation in the different languages through which they have passed before reaching ours.

It should also be remembered that the smaller dictionaries, such as this one, provide a selection, based on currency, of a recorded stock of over half a million words; that is to say, they represent about 15–20 per cent of what is attested to exist by printed sources and other materials. Dictionaries therefore differ in the selection they make, beyond the core of vocabulary and idiom that can be expected to be found in any dictionary.

Dialect

Within the British Isles, regional forms and dialects, with varying accents and usage, have continued to exist since the Middle Ages, although in recent times, especially with the emergence of mass communications, they have been in decline. A special feature of a dialect is its vocabulary of words (often for everyday things) that are understood only locally. It is not possible in a small dictionary to treat this kind of vocabulary in any detail, but its influence can be seen in the origins of words that have achieved a more general currency, for example boss-eyed (from a dialect word boss meaning 'miss', 'bungle'), fad, scrounge (from a dialect scrunge meaning 'steal') and shoddy. Far more information on dialect words is available in The English Dialect Dictionary (ed. J. Wright, London, 1898–1905), in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in numerous glossaries published by dialect societies.

English Worldwide

Usage in modern times is greatly influenced by rapid worldwide communications, by newspapers and, in particular, by television and radio. Speakers of British English are brought into daily contact with alternative forms of the language, especially American English. This influence is often regarded as unsettling or harmful but it has had a considerable effect on the vocabulary, idiom, and spelling of British English, and continues to do so. Among the many words and idioms in use in British English, usually without any awareness of or concern about their American origin, are OK, to fall for, to fly off the handle, round trip, and to snoop. American English often has more regular spellings.

English is now used all over the world; as a result, there are many varieties of English, with varying accents, vocabulary, and usage. Varieties in use in Southern Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere have an equal claim to be regarded as 'English' and, although learners of English may look to British English as the centre of an English-speaking world, or British and American English as the two poles of such a world, it is very important that dictionaries should take account of English overseas, especially as it affects usage in Britain. The process is a strengthening and enriching one, and is the mark of a living and flourishing language.

Further reading

This survey has had to be brief, and restricted to those aspects of English that are of immediate concern to the users of a dictionary. Those who are interested in exploring further will find a host of books on the history and development of English. Good general accounts are A. C. Baugh and T. Cable, A History of the English Language (3rd edn., New Jersey and London, 1978) and B. M. H. Strang, A History of English (London, 1970). At a more popular level, and more up to date on recent trends, are R. W. Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford, 1985) and R. McCrum et al., The Story of English (London, 1986). The Oxford Companion to the English Language (ed. T. McArthur, Oxford, 1992) contains much that will interest those who want to know more about the English of today and its place among the languages of the world.