Bookish Words & their Surprising Stories

Auteur

David Crystal is a writer, editor, lecturer, broadcaster on language, and an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, UK. His many books include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Language and A Date with Language, the latter also published by the Bodleian Library. You may find his website at davidcrystal.com.

Texte du rabat

Travel through time with words that have shaped the trajectory of the English language across centuries.

The world of books has played a striking role in the history of English vocabulary. "Book" itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from "boc" in Old English, and appears in many commonly used expressions today, including by the book, bring to book, and bookworm, to name a few.

With the arrival of printing and typesetting, and the development of the newspaper industry came terminology that birthed commonly used phrases such as "stop the press," "front-page news," and "hit the headlines." The emergence of the internet generated even more.

This anthology presents a selection of more than one hundred words that show the influence of writing, reading, and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time.

Résumé
This book tells the fascinating stories behind 100 everyday words that have been influenced by writing, reading and publishing books.