Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

Vocabulary boomed in the sixteenth century, and many of those new words were words borrowed from lovely, literary languages on the Continent—Latin, Italian, and French. The Romance-language borrowings weren’t without controversy—Shakespeare himself made fun of people who piled on the highfalutin foreignisms just to sound smart*5—and by the end of the century the language was growing so quickly, both with borrowed words from other languages and with foreign speakers attempting to get their mouths around this burgeoning language, that a handful of native speakers stepped in to provide order. In 1586, William Bullokar, a man who was interested in regularizing and reforming English, published the first English grammar (appropriately titled Bref Grammar for English); in 1604, Robert Cawdrey published what is held to be the first monolingual English dictionary. The concern was that English was becoming terribly unruly, and it needed some reining in. Some called for a large-scale remedy—an academy of English that would not only prescribe good usage but proscribe bad stuff out of English. By “bad stuff,” they meant not just words that people thought were uncouth but all forms of the language—styles, uses, poetic meters, the whole kit and caboodle—that were deemed inelegant and unlovely.