Geoffrey Hughes, A history of English words. Oxford (UK) & Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2000. Pp. v, 430. Pb $29.95.

Abstract

In this ambitious book, Hughes extends and broadens the projects of his two earlier books, Words in time: A social history of the English vocabulary (1988), and Swearing: A social history of foul language, oaths and profanity in English (1991). The contents range from summaries of events in the history of English to specialized lexical studies; the work's real strength, as with Hughes's two earlier books, lies in its investigations of the English vocabulary. While moving in a generally diachronic fashion from the origins of English to present-day Englishes, Hughes devotes much of the book to snapshots of the English lexis at various points and in various registers, queries as to how these configurations came about, how they affect other areas of the language, and why they matter to speakers. The motivation for the book, and its great accomplishment, is to show that the English lexis is a rich historical repository. Chronological discussions can be found elsewhere, but the treatments of moments in the English lexis provided by Hughes form a special and engaging contribution. As the book jacket states, Hughes interrogates the vocabulary “as an indicator of social change and as a symbol reflecting different social dynamics between speech communities and models of dominance, cohabitation, colonialism, and globalization.”