Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

The bloody battle to defend English and champion “good grammar” hasn’t always been in existence; in fact, prior to about the middle of the fifteenth century, there was very, very little thought given to English as a language of discourse, officialdom, and permanence. Prior to that, most official documents were recorded in Latin (the gold standard for Languages of Record) or French.*1 Sure, there had always been anonymous writers (and a few onymous*2 ones, too, like Geoffrey Chaucer) who chose to preserve their wisdom—or fart jokes, in the case of Chaucer—in English, but it wasn’t taken seriously as a literary language until Henry V suddenly began using it in his official correspondence in 1417. Within a few decades, English had become the language of the English bureaucracy, replacing French and Latin almost completely. The problem with this shift was that both French and Latin, having been used as languages of record for a while, were already comparatively standardized, and English was not. Latin and French had written forms that stood independent of their pronunciation; English, on the other hand, was entirely phonetically spelled. That meant that while Medieval Latin had one way to spell the word that we know as “right” (rectus) and Old French as used in English laws and literature had six (drait, dres, drez, drettes, dreyt, and droit), Middle English, the form of English in use when it became an official language of record, had a whopping seventy-seven recorded ways to...