At the end of the 16th century, there was little reason to guess that English would emerge four centuries later as the most widely dispersed language in the world.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth – the first, that is, from 1558 to 1603 – the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between 5 and 7 million. At the beginning of the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth in 1952, the figure had increased almost fiftyfold. In 1962, Randolph Quirk estimated in The Use of English that 250 millions had English as a mother tongue, with a further 100 million using it as a second or foreign language.

The first part of a four-part gazetteer of the basic geopolitical vocabulary of the English language, dealing with the facts, fancies, fallacies, ambiguities and subtle implications in such words. For convenience of presentation, the material is not in strict alphabetical order.

For its first interview, English Today talks to Alan Lee Williams, Director-General, the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth, about his association's aims, history, organization, membership, projects and approach to the English language.

In recent years, feminists in particular have argued for reform in languages like English in order to reduce or eliminate built-in masculine biases. Do they have a case, can realistic changes be made and accepted by users at large, or is the language simply adapting anyway to this challenge as it has adapted to others in the past?

Kaleidoscope is a showcase for special varieties of English. Each issue of ET displays one or more samples, along with notes and illustrations to clarify certain words and usages or to add more information about them. Usually, we cover one ethnic or cultural variety, where English is in contact with an entirely different language, and one social, occupational or technical variety, where the special usages relate to a particular interest group. In this issue, the cultural variety is Standard English used for the international discussion of Islam (where none of the users are native speakers of English), and the social-cum-technical variety deals with computers.

The Apple Corporation of America, makers of the famous Apple personal computer, are about to launch a brand new and very interesting new machine. Called the MacIntosh, it is a scaled down version of the recent (and very expensive) Apple Lisa … The Mac has its own 9 inch monochrome monitor and a single Sony 3.5 inch, 500kbyte disc drive. Although the option of a second disc drive is offered, few users are likely to take it. This is because the operating system and applications programmes will be in the form of ROM cartridges, leaving the disc for the user.

Non-native users of English now outnumber the home-grown variety. How has this come about and what are its possible consequences? Why are millions of people now learning English as their ‘other tongue’? And what does it mean in the Eighties to be a foreign user of the English language?

The first known woman lexicographer was the Abbess Herrad in the 12th century, while the first in English appears to have been Sam Johnson's friend Mrs Hester Thrale or Piozzi (with her British Synonymy in 1794). There were never many, right into our own century, but nowadays it is no longer unusual to find women in controlling positions in the world of lexicography. Tom McArthur interviews two such women among the words: ELIZABETH KIRKPATRICK, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and DELLA SUMMERS in Harlow, England.

What do we understand nowadays by the traditional phrase ‘English literature’? Is it the literature of England and England alone, or of the whole British Isles when English is used, or does it cover the literature of all the world when that literature is cast in English?