A Brief History of Written English

Written English first appeared at a time when there was no standard spoken English, yet alone English spelling! While the Roman occupation had introduced the Latin alphabet, most of the Anglo-Saxon settlers continued to use a runic system and the earliest surviving manuscripts in Old English from the 6th century onwards are a mixture of the two forms — and thus completely incomprehensible to the modern English reader.

This changed slightly as Christian missionaries started to convert the Pagan settlers, Anglo-Saxon and Viking alike, to Christianity. From the 6th century onwards, monks such as St. Augustine not only brought with them Christian theology, but also Latin scripture and Roman ideas of education.

Writing in Latin rather than his Northumbrian form of English, Brian’s first historian, Bede , notes the importance of interpres (i.e. multi-lingual translators such as himself) in the formation of a common language with which to spread the Christian doctrine. From this point, runes began to disappear and English began to increasingly resemble the Latin written form.

Dark Age attempts to create a standard English were however effectively curtailed by the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the arrival of the Medieval era. Now French became the language of those in power, with English no longer being extensively taught or studied in monasteries. With most scribes having French as their native language, what was still written in English invariably grew to resemble French, and Middle English was born.

These problems were compounded by the way English was communicated. With most written English transcribed through speaking, no definitive authority whatsoever, and with monks often working a lifetime on a single document, it is thus unsurprising that a huge variety of styles and spellings would exist even within copies of the same original source.

However, over the course of centuries, the complex needs of governing a deeply divided and disunited country led to a move away from writing in French to Chancery English, a more standardised form of English regulated by the Court of Chancery. Heavily indebted to French, written English in its modern form began to appear.

One of the true forefathers of the English language was the author Geoffrey Chaucer (circa. 1340–1400). Deliberately writing in English rather than French or Latin precisely because its relatively simpler grammatical structure lent itself better to poetry, he produced massively popular works of fiction.

Poetry requires structure, and his use of iambic pentameter served to create a standard sentence form that’s still seen today. Moreover, his deliberate use of colloquial English as a way of bringing his everyday characters to life meant that thousands of English words were used in written form for the first time . To the Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, Chaucer “purified the English of his time from its dross! He shaped it into a fit instrument for his use.”

A few decades after Chaucer, a German craftsman, Johannes Gutenberg, invented a device that would fundamentally change the written language forever, the printing press. Prior to movable type, documents were replicated slowly and laboriously on an individual basis, with different creators and the inevitable margin for error.

Now, not only could the same document be recreated thousands of times, but it benefitted the printers themselves to have a standardised set of spellings to speed up the process. In time, printing became publishing, which brought with it rules for spelling and grammar. The problem was, however, that there was still no overriding authority, and many spellings were still done phonetically, resulting in wild disparities across regions, dialects and social classes.

By the 1700s, despite a rapid growth in literacy, spelling was still largely random. Writers simply wrote words in the way they felt they sounded and many of the most celebrated authors such as Shakespeare made up words when they considered that no suitable equivalent in the English language existed.

Concerned with the lack of standard practice, and seeking to speed up the printing process — and thus make more money — in 1746 a consortium of prominent English printers and publishers approached the writer Samuel Johnson and asked him to compile a complete dictionary of English words. Although dictionaries had previously existed, they suffered from the same inconsistencies as all other published works.

Finally completed in 1755 after a decade of the most intellectually challenging pioneering work, his Dictionary of the English Language grew to be the authoritative text of English spelling and meaning, and Modern English grew to replace Middle English.

However, by the Victorian era, the Dictionary of the English Language was becoming antiquated. The Industrial Revolution and its societal changes had created a plethora of new words needing to be defined and standardised.

With education becoming increasingly available to the poor and indeed women and literacy growing rapidly once more, it was decided that a definitive new dictionary was needed to better reflect the needs of the modern age. This monumental work was based on a project by the Philological Society from 1857 which identified seven key shortcomings in all English-language dictionaries, including Johnson’s: Incomplete coverage of obsolete words

Inconsistent coverage of families of related words

Incorrect dates for earliest use of words

History of obsolete senses of words often omitted

Inadequate distinction among synonyms

Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations

Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.

First published in 1884 as the 352-page New English Dictionary it grew into a work of true Victorian hubris — the complete definition of every word in the English language, past and present! After decades of exhausting research by generations of intellectuals generally working alphabetically including the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, in 1928 its final (125th) version appeared.

Spanning 10 volumes and covering over 400,000 definitions, its name was changed to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1933 and it has been updated yearly ever since. Currently containing over 500,000 words and phrases its full repository of words is only available online, though its smaller, printed form is still in daily use worldwide.

English today

Written English continues to evolve in the digital age. After nearly 1500 years, rune-like pictograms have once again appeared in the form of instantly recognisable emojis, the boundaries between formal and colloquial English have become blurred, online spellcheckers routinely change UK English spelling to American, and English becomes globalised and increasingly distant from the original source.

Perhaps in a few centuries Modern English as we know it may be replaced by an entirely new form. What is certain is that it will be as unfamiliar to us as each earlier incarnation — consistently adapting and developing organically to a point where standardisation itself may eventually become impossible.