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Table of Contents

Anyone writing about the English language is profoundly indebted to those who have gone before. Where I have been sure of my obligations to others, I have made them clear either in the text or in my notes, but inevitably there are some I have failed to recognize or remember. In order to keep end matter to a reasonable minimum, some quotations have been included in the text without a full reference. Where a quotation is from a well-known source, such as the Bible or Shakespeare, or where it can readily be found in a dictionary or an online resource, a detailed reference has not been provided. For quotations from works that are less readily available I have given details of the source.

My continual recourse to The Oxford English Dictionary has enriched my sense of quite how extraordinary a feat of scholarly collaboration it is. We consult dictionaries rather as the Bible was once consulted for definitive truth. Faith in dictionaries is often blind. As Dr Johnson pointed out, dictionaries are like watches, since the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. But the OED has served me magnificently, again and again. So have other dictionaries and works of reference, notably The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . In the interests of concision and readability, I have not always explicitly marked these debts in my text.

In the course of my work I have received kindnesses from David Crystal, Joanna Gray, Helen Hawksfield, Kwasi Kwarteng, Guy Ladenburg, Douglas Matthews, Dan OHara, Rowan Routh, Benedict Shaw, James Spackman and Christopher Tyerman, as well as from the patient staff of the British Library, London. For greater acts of generosity I wish to thank Richard Arundel, Joshua Burch,Alex Burghart, Christopher Burlinson, Jonty Claypole, Bob Davenport, Sam Gilpin, John Mullan and especially Robert Macfarlane.

My agents, Peter Straus and Melanie Jackson, immediately understood what sort of book I wanted to write. At John Murray, Anya Serota embraced the idea, and Eleanor Birne skilfully and trustingly saw it through to fruition. At Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Eric Chinski was especially supportive, and I am indebted also to Corinna Barsan, Christopher Caines, Eugenie Cha, Susan Goldfarb, Gena Hamshaw, Matt Kaye and Ethan Rutherford.

My greatest debts are to my parents, generous as ever in many ways, and to Angela, whose support has been at once tactful, affectionate and unstinting.

Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnsons Dictionary

Chapter 1: Ensemble

The Diary of Samuel Sewall , ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), I, 380. Regarding the choice of Torrey as president of Harvard, see Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University , 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Owen, 1840), I, 38.

James Harris, Hermes: Or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (London: Nourse and Vaillant, 1751), 408-9.

My examples of animal communication are borrowed from Jean-Louis Dessalles, Why We Talk:The Evolutionary Origins of Language , trans. James Grieve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3-29.

Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 557.

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation , 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24.

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 125, 140.

The case is made engagingly, though incompletely, in M. J. Harper, The History of Britain Revealed (London: Nathan Carmody, 2002).

The question of how the Indo-European languages spread is still moot. The hypothesis mentioned here was first advanced by Colin Renfrew in the 1980s.

John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (London: William Heinemann, 2002), 95.

Dieter Katsovksy, Vocabulary, in Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 199.

I borrow this useful phrase from T. E. Hope, Loanwords as Cultural and Lexical Symbols, Archivum Linguisticum 14 (1962), 120.

Linda and Roger Flavell, The Chronology of Words and Phrases (London: Kyle Cathie, 1999), 165.

Horace, On the Art of Poetry , in Classical Literary Criticism , trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 80-81.

David Crystal, How Language Works (London: Penguin, 2005), 225.

Stanley M. Tsuzaki and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Loanwords in English, General Linguistics 9 (1969), 22-40.

Christopher Ball, Lexis: The Vocabulary of English, in W. F. Bolton and David Crystal (eds.), The English Language (London: Penguin, 1993), 182-3.

John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure (London: Picador, 1996), 43.

Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows (London: Faber, 2005), 154.

Louis Deroy, LEmprunt linguistique (Paris: Socit dEdition Les Belles Lettres, 1956), 215.

Examples from Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 142, and Pius N. Tamanji, Indirect Borrowing: A Source of Lexical Expansion, in George Echu and Samuel Gyasi Obeng (eds.), Africa Meets Europe: Language Contact in West Africa (New York: Nova Science, 2004), 78.

Chapter 2: Invade

Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits , ed. Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27-28, 132.

The designation Celts was not used in British history until the sixteenth century, and in the eyes of specialists it is a rather lazy catch-all for the peoples who lived in Britain and Gaul before the rise of the Roman Empire. I use the term here because it is convenient and commonly understood.

Barry Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5-6.

Celtic also, at least on the Continent, made some impact on Latin. The subject is discussed in J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Adams notes that Latin took a considerable number of terms to do with transport and horsemanship from Celtic, a reflection of Gaulish expertise in such matters and of trading contacts between Gauls and Latin speakers (p. 184).

It seems significant that the Latin schola explicitly denoted a place of study, whereas the older Greek word schol denoted leisure which among Greeks was expected, though not guaranteed, to be given over to study.

This information comes from Helena Drysdale, Mother Tongues: Travels through Tribal Europe (London: Picador, 2002), 129.

Clearly, under Roman rule, some people had permanently transplanted themselves to Britain from the Mediterranean, but they were in the minority.

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkanen (eds.), The Celtic Roots of English (Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, 2002), 6.

In his book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (London: Century, 1999), David Keys has argued for another factor in the changing fabric of Britain: a huge natural disaster around AD 535, possibly a volcanic eruption or asteroid collision, that resulted in famine, migration and political change. He explains, for instance, that Tree-ring evidence from the British Isles shows that tree growth slowed down significantly in 535-6 and did not fully recover until 555 (p. 110), and identifies this period as one of climactic chaos (p. 112) characterized by freak storms and exceptionally bitter winters.

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