And then came William Caxton, and with him the very beginnings of Modern English. It was in 1474 that, having learned the techniques of printing from the master craftsmen of Cologne, this 50-year-old Kentish businessman set himself up in Bruges and created, on a wooden press of his own making, the first ever book to be printed in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (which, in addition, he had translated from the French—recuyell meaning, essentially, compilation). The reception of this 700-page work convinced him: he had no doubt at all now that the new technology which he had mastered in Europe, if taken back home to England, would have an incalculable effect both on society at large and on the nature of the language that people would read from his printed books and papers and pamphlets, and which in turn they would come to speak.
And so two years later he came to London, and established his own print shop and publishing house beside Westminster Abbey. From the hands of Caxton and his apprentices came some 103 printed works 3 —one edition of Chaucer's Boethius and two of the Canterbury Tales among them. Moreover, the books that he made were (as Caxton was not shy of advertising) available to almost all, for the simple reason that they cost almost nothing to produce. Compared to the laborious and costly hand-copying of manuscripts, the books and pamphlets that were now being turned off his creaking wooden presses were inexpensive in the extreme. `If it plese ony man … to bye …', announced one of Caxton's printed flyers, `… late hym come to Westmonester … and he shal have them good chepe.' What more eloquent declaration could there ever be of the lasting benefits of printing?
With the advent of printing, as exemplified by Caxton's house, came a greater awareness of the multifarious dialects in which English was then both spoken and written, and the beginnings of a feeling that there should be a standard written form of the language. A famous story relates to Caxton's own puzzlement over the word `eggs'—should he use the northern form, egges, or the southern version, eyren? It took many years before questions like this were fully answered—a question over the use of apostrophes, for example, never being fully answered to this day.
Any remaining hopes, nurtured as they were by a small corps of romantics, that the language might still be shorn of all its nonGermanic words and returned to the purity of its ancestry were to be dashed during the two centuries that followed the Caxton revolution—the Renaissance. With the furious development of science, arts, exploration, and travel, the language became ever more steadily enriched—unkinder souls might say polluted—by an almost uncountable mass of newly imported words from abroad. The size of the lexicon had doubled in the years after the Norman invasion; in the Renaissance it doubled again, such that by the beginning of the seventeenth century there were reckoned to be at the very least 200,000 knowable words waiting to be used.
The conventional sources—Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French—supplied many of them; but now, with the wanderings of the fleets and their inquisitive occupants producing words from all over, the English vocabulary was enhanced not merely by the usual suspects but by words from India and Turkey, Arabia and Malaya, Japan and the native peoples of North America, and 50 other countries besides.
Some of the more romantically inclined writers of the day despised the trend—John Cheke, for example, was still vainly wishing for a return to his `clean and pure tunge'. On the other hand some modernists, like the author and diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot, positively craved foreign words, as though they were plagued by some curious lexico-xenophilic sickness. Elyot was on intimate terms with King Henry VIII (the monarch loaned him books from the royal library, to help with a Latin±English dictionary he was then compiling), and was said to be a brilliantly skilled translator, widely travelled, and a hugely competent linguist. He wished above all to have his native English `augmented' and `enriched' with new words from around the world, to describe and define all the wondrous new objects and ideas that the Renaissance was bringing in its wake. And by and large, he got his way. The purists, never a formidable army at the best of times, were during the Renaissance being routed. English in the sixteenth century was getting larger and larger, and by doing so was fast strengthening itself for its unanticipated role as the coming language of the world. Analyses suggest that between 1590 and 1610 around 6,000 new words were being added to the lexicon every year—more than at any time in history (save possibly, we feel intuitively, for today).
There are far too many words newly introduced in the Renaissance to be listed here, in a short book which is simply the story of one dictionary, and is by no stretch of the imagination a dictionary itself. But sometimes the loveliness of the assemblages are just too beguiling to pass up: so it is pleasing to note that during the 200 years following Caxton, English welcomed from abroad such words as anonymous, atmosphere, catastrophe, criterion, delirium, enthusiasm, fact, idiosyncrasy, inclemency, lunar, malignant, necessitate, parasite, pneumonia, sculptor, skeleton, soda, vicinity, and virus (all from either Latin or Greek); battery, bayonet, chocolate, confront, docility, grotesque, moustache, passport, tomato, and volunteer (from or through the good offices of the French); balcony, cupola, ditto, granite, grotto, macaroni, piazza, sonata, sonnet, stanza, and violin from Italian; anchovy, armada, armadillo, cannibal, mulatto, Negro, sombrero, and yam from or via either Spanish or Portuguese; and a gallimaufry of delights from some 50 other contributing tongues, including amok, paddy, and sago (from Malay), caravan 4 and turban (Persian), kiosk, sherbet, and yoghurt (Turkish), raccoon and wampum (Algonquian), cruise, frolic, and yacht (Dutch), knapsack (Low German), as well as guru from Hindi, ketchup from Cantonese, sofa from Arabic, shogun from Japanese, sheikh from Arabic, and trousers from the Gaelic spoken by the Irish.
Shakespeare—as vital a purveyor of what would go on to become Modern English as William Caxton had been two centuries before him, and as were the various great English bibles produced shortly after him—was the first to employ a great many of these words. By doing so he offered actors the chance to enrich the language of those who came to see his plays. In Othello, for example, the Moor entreats the Duke of Venice to offer his wife Desdemona `Due reference of place and exhibition, With such accomodation and besort as levels with her breeding', and thereby offers the first known usage (Othello was published in 1604) of the word accommodation 5 . Likewise, when Antonio and Bassanio's friends are chatting in the opening scene of The Merchant of Venice, Solanio gives us the first use of the word laughable—`they'll not show their teeth in way of smile Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable'. Laugh itself is a word from the widely approved Old English; in 1596 Shakespeare added the Norman French suffix -able, and lo! the combination still exists happily today, four centuries later.
(It has to be said that Shakespeare did advance the cause of a number of words—like besort—that never made it, or which staggered along lamely for only a short while. Among those he used, but he almost alone, were soilure, tortive, and vastidity, which mean, as one might expect, staining, twisted, and bigness. In these cases, and a score of others, his clever Latinate constructions fared rather less well than the simpler old synonyms from northern Europe. But he also gives modern readers such hyphenations as baby-eyes, pell-mell, and ill-tuned, and dozens of insults that employ the word knave—of which whoreson beetle-headed flap-ear'd knave (from The Taming of the Shrew) has become a minor classic.)
And since Shakespeare—and since William Hazlitt and Jane Austen, since Wordsworth and Thackeray, the Naipauls and the Amises, and the fantasy worlds of the hobbits and Harry Potter, and since science and sport and conquest and defeat—the language that we call Modern English has just grown and grown, almost exponentially. Words from every corner of the globalized world cascade in ceaselessly, daily topping up a language that is self-evidently living, breathing, changing, evolving as no other language ever has, nor is ever likely to.