RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.

EDITOR'S PREFACE

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

CONTENTS

ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT

I ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE

IV CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS

This e-text uses a number of special characters, including:

• vowels with macrons: ā ē ō
• vowels with breves: ă ĕ ŏ
• accented Greek: ἀ ἔ ἦ ϊ ῦ ῳ
• phonetic symbols: ɛ ɨ ɵ ŋ

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A short passage on page 222 uses some symbols that are not in Unicode; see the explanation at the end of the text for images of the original symbols and the transcription scheme.

In the original book, the odd-numbered pages have unique headers, represented here as sidenotes.

Obvious printing errors involving punctuation (such as missing single quotes), as well as alphabetization errors in the index, have been corrected without notes. Other corrections of printing errors are noted using mouse-hover popups like this. Variation in the spelling of the names Jonson/Johnson, Spenser/Spencer, and Ralegh/Raleigh is as in the original.