The Du Maurier family had several illustrious members. Daphne Du Maurier (1907-1989) is now probably the best-known, a prolific novelist whose writing inspired such films as Rebecca, Don’t Look Now,…
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At the dawn of the 20th century, English was still recognizably a single homogeneous language, albeit one with a major distinctive variety, in North America, whose speakers now outnumbered those…
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Please note: several of the following links to dictionary content require subscriber access to the OED Online. Where next with the OED Online? there’s more on the development of early…
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Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, as it is sometimes called) is the term used to refer to the oldest recorded stage of the English language, i.e. from the earliest evidence in…
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Old English is the name given to the earliest recorded stage of the English language, up to approximately 1150AD (when the Middle English period is generally taken to have begun)….
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For many people the nineteenth century was a time of profound and accelerated change, one in which, as the poet and writer Thomas Arnold remarked, it seemed possible to live…
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Further reading on Middle English Simon Horobin and Jeremy Smith, An Introduction to Middle English (2002) Roger Lass, ‘Phonology and morphology’, in Norman Blake, ed. The Cambridge History of the…
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This article provides a selection of the main grammatical differences between early modern and late modern English; many more can be found within the OED entries for individual words. Where…
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Please note: several of the following links to dictionary content require subscriber access to the OED Online. What is the influence of the King James Bible (1611) on the English…
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In the late-fifteenth century printers began printing books written in the form of London English which had already become a kind of standard in manuscript documents. Between 1475 and about…
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