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Old English
The earliest known residents of the British Isles were the Celts, who spoke Celtic languages—a separate branch of the Indo-European language family tree. Over the centuries the British Isles were invaded and conquered by various peoples, who brought their languages and customs with them as they settled in their new lives. -
May 20, 1154
Middle English
Middle English develops out of Late Old English in Norman England (1066–1154) and is spoken throughout the Plantagenet era (1154–1485). The end of the Middle English period is set at about 1470, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press to England by William Caxton in the late 1470s. -
May 20, 1558
Queen Elizabeth
Elizabeth Tudor is considered by many to be the greatest monarch in English history. When she became queen in 1558, she was twenty-five years old, a survivor of scandal and danger, and considered illegitimate by most Europeans. She inherited a bankrupt nation, torn by religious discord, a weakened pawn between the great powers of France and Spain. She was only the third queen to rule England in her own right; the other two examples, her cousin Lady Jane Grey and half-sister Mary I, were disastro -
Early Modern English
Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th century. English was further transformed by the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration and by the standardising effect of printing. By the time of William Shakespeare (mid-late 16th century),[6] the language had become clearly recognizable as Modern English. In 1604, the first English dictionary was published, the Table Alphabeticall. -
Shakespeare
The most striking feature of Shakespeare is his command of language. It is all the more astounding when one not only considers Shakespeare's sparse formal education but the curriculum of the day. There were no dictionaries; the first such lexical work for speakers of English was compiled by schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey as A Table Alphabeticall in 1604. -
Modern English
In 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary, his Dictionary of the English Language.
The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. -
Late Modern English
Late Modern English has many more words, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words. -
Proto-English
The languages of Germanic peoples gave rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes and possibly the Franks, who traded and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire in the centuries-long process of the Germanic peoples' expansion into Western Europe during the Migration Period). Some Latin words for common objects entered the vocabulary of these Germanic peoples before their arrival in Britain and their subsequent formation of England.