Neoclassical Borrowings: ‘Hard Words’ in English

doi:10.1017/9781009205702.015

12 - Neoclassical Borrowings: ‘Hard Words’ in English

from Part II - Contact and External Influences

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2025

Letizia Vezzosi and

Luca Baratta

Edited by

Laura Wright and

Raymond Hickey

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Laura Wright: Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Raymond Hickey: Affiliation:
University of Limerick

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Summary

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum) considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such ‘hard words’, and often attest them for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shaping the structure vocabulary, thanks also to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from ‘hard words‘ dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.

Keywords

hard words inkhorn term borrowings Latin street literature teratological lexicon

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Type: Chapter
Information: The New Cambridge History of the English Language
Context, Contact and Development
, pp. 324 - 355

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205702.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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