Communication is essential, but do you really know where the words you use come from? With words borrowed from Arabic, French and Dutch - among many others - words reveal a secret history, reflect social change and remind us of the past. 'His book...
This tells the brilliant story of how Dr Johnson succeeded in writing the first great English Dictionary. After eight years of work his dictionary, full of idiosyncrasies, was published, becoming the most important British cultural monument of the 18th...