'Sir Thomas Elyot (1538) or Robert Cawdrey (1604) who sought to gather up the 'hard English wordes' :
- 'parentate: to celebrate one's parents' funeral'.
- 'magnitude: greatness'
- 'OATS. n.s. (a_en, Saxon) A grain, which in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. (Scottish people are poor)'
- imposed a lot of his personality into how he defined particular words
- took just over 8 years to complete
- List of over 40,000 words
- 6 helpers
- 'first suggested by the Philological Society in 1857 is a truly paradigmatic one. Five years into a proposed ten-year project the editors had reached 'ant' and the massive twelve-volume dictionary was not finally published until 1928. 'by 1933 another team were hard at work keeping the dictionary 'current'
- Existing dictionaries were incomplete and deficient
- called for a complete re- examination of the language from Anglo-Saxon times
- 6400 pages including language from the Early Middle English period
- 'It is likely in our Internet generation you will have encountered many new initialisations and acronyms, such as LOL and LMAO but have you seen ROTFLMAOSTC (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off Scaring The Cat)? AFAIK (As far as I know) this can happen A3 (Anywhere, anytime, anyplace) but probably not when PRW (parents are watching). There are several online dictionaries trying to keep pace with these changes, such as www.hyperdictionary.com.'
- Rise of prescriptive attitudes with the creation of dictionaries and grammar books (correct or incorrect)
- Allowed for standardisation
- Rise in the power of people who were prescriptive and had authority over language
- Increase of the need to use 'proper' English - seem more upper class
- Technology has a huge impact upon language e.g. Waterstones - cannot use an apostrophe in a URL
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