Late Modern English to Present Day (1700–Present)

The Late Modern English (LModE) period — from approximately 1700 to the present — is characterised by explosive vocabulary growth, the global spread of English through colonialism and technology, intense debates about linguistic authority, and the emergence of multiple national and regional varieties. While the grammatical structure of English has remained relatively stable since 1700, the language's lexicon, social distribution, and global reach have changed beyond recognition.

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The Age of Codification (18th Century)

The 18th century was the great age of prescriptive codification — the systematic attempt to fix, regulate, and improve the English language through dictionaries and grammars.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755)

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, the most significant English dictionary before the Oxford English Dictionary.

Johnson's dictionary was a landmark for several reasons:

Feature	Significance
Comprehensive coverage	c. 42,773 entries — far more than any previous dictionary
Illustrative quotations	Used over 114,000 quotations from literature to show how words were actually used
Etymology	Attempted to trace word origins (though not always accurately by modern standards)
Usage notes	Marked words as "low," "cant," or "barbarous" — early prescriptivism
Definitions	Often witty and opinionated: oats — "a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"

Johnson originally aimed to "fix" the language — to prevent further change. In the Preface, however, he acknowledged that this was impossible: "to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride." This tension between the desire to fix language and the recognition that change is inevitable is central to the prescriptivism-descriptivism debate.

Prescriptive Grammarians

The 18th century also produced the most influential prescriptive grammars of English:

Grammarian	Work	Key Features
Robert Lowth (1710–1787)	A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762)	Established many prescriptive rules still cited today: no split infinitives, no sentence-final prepositions, no double negatives
Lindley Murray (1745–1826)	English Grammar (1795)	The best-selling grammar of the 19th century; codified Lowth's rules for a wider audience

Lowth's grammar is particularly significant because many of its "rules" were based on Latin grammar rather than on how English was actually used. For example:

• "Never end a sentence with a preposition" — derived from Latin syntax, where prepositions must precede their objects. English has always used stranded prepositions ("What are you looking at?"), and the "rule" was unknown before Lowth.
• "Never split an infinitive" — based on the fact that Latin infinitives are single words (amare = "to love") and therefore cannot be split. English infinitives are two words (to love), so splitting them is a natural feature of the language.

Prescriptivism is the belief that there are correct and incorrect forms of language, and that language use should be governed by rules laid down by authorities such as grammarians and dictionary-makers.

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Vocabulary Expansion: Industrial Revolution and Beyond

The Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840) created an enormous demand for new vocabulary to describe new inventions, processes, and social phenomena:

Source	Examples
Technology	railway, locomotive, engine, telegraph, telephone, electricity, factory
Science	biology, oxygen, hydrogen, evolution, vaccination, anaesthetic, chromosome
Social change	capitalism, socialism, industrialism, urbanisation, proletariat
Word formation processes	Compounding (railway), affixation (industrialism), borrowing (oxygen from French), conversion, blending

The pace of lexical innovation has only increased since the Industrial Revolution. The 20th and 21st centuries have added vocabulary from computing (software, algorithm, bandwidth, cloud), social media (selfie, tweet, hashtag, viral, troll), and global culture (emoji, anime, manga, sushi, yoga).

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The Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), first published in full in 1928 (as the New English Dictionary), is the most comprehensive historical dictionary of English, tracing the development of every word from its earliest recorded use.

The OED project, begun in 1857 under the Philological Society and edited by James Murray (1837–1915) from 1879, aimed to record every word in the language with dated illustrative quotations showing how meaning and usage had changed over time. Key facts:

Feature	Detail
First edition	Published in fascicles 1884–1928; 10 volumes; 414,825 entries
Second edition	1989; 20 volumes; 616,500 entries
Third edition	Currently in progress online; continuously updated
Method	Historical principles — earliest known use, with quotations showing development
Approach	Descriptive, not prescriptive — records how words are used, not how they "should" be used