Adjective

English (not comparable)

Positive English

Comparative not comparable

Superlative none (absolute)

1. English-language; of or pertaining to the English language.
2. Of or pertaining to England or its people.
3. Of or pertaining to the avoirdupois system of measure.

   an English ton

Derived terms

• English saddle
• Englishman
• gone English

Look at pages starting with English.

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of the United States since the mid 20th century, it has been widely dispersed around the world, become the leading language of international discourse, and has acquired use as lingua franca in many regions. It is widely learned as a second language and used as an official language of the European Union and many Commonwealth countries, as well as in many world organizations. It is the third most natively spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

Historically, English originated from the fusion of languages and dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) settlers beginning in the 5th century – with the word "English" being derived from the name of the Angles. The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language with Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th century.

The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman-French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages to what had now become Middle English.

A significant number of English words are constructed based on roots from Latin, due to Latin in some form being the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life.

Modern English developed with the Great Vowel Shift that began in 15th-century England, and continues to adopt foreign words from a variety of languages, as well as coining new words.

English is arguably the largest language by number of words, and is certainly considerably larger than any other European language; the Oxford English Dictionary lists 500,000 words, not including a variety of technical or scientific terms.

Quotations about the English language or some aspect of it. English is one of the most widespread and most widely spoken languages in the world.

Contents

• 1 Sourced
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 See also
• 4 External links

Sourced

• The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
  • James D. Nicoll (1990-05-15). "The King's English". rec.arts.sf-lovers. (Google Groups).

• To boldly go is rhythmically very neat. The Star Trek scriptwriter hasn't been linguistically bold at all.
  • David Crystal in Who Cares About English Usage

• The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish....
  • Fowler's Modern English Usage, second edition, p 579

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Fri Jul 2 04:29:38 2010