History

A straight fact about English: in today's dictionary about 28% of the words come from French, about 28% from Latin, about 6% from Greek, and about 25% are native Germanic (Finkenstaedt & Wolff, the classic 1973 count). The language that looks "most English" has three quarters of its vocabulary borrowed. I have sorted through the years how those words entered, layer by layer: the Germanic base laid down in 449, the two big imports from the Norse and the Norman conquest, the Renaissance Latin and Greek wave, and finally the imperial-era reflux of words from everywhere.

If you prefer the interactive view, go straight to the timeline — its 33 nodes correspond to this general history one to one.

Old English (449-1066): landing and naming

In 449 Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People records three Germanic tribes crossing the sea into Britain: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The word English comes from the Angles: their language was called Englisc and their land Engla land, later written as England. Britain's earlier Celtic inhabitants left a small stratum of loanwords (bin, ass, bannock); Celtic's overall effect on English vocabulary is surprisingly small.

In 597 Augustine reached Canterbury to preach; Christianization brought the first wave of Latin loans: school, street (from Latin strata via, "the paved way"), candle, altar, priest, paper. All religious, educational and architectural terms, all arriving through the church.

Old English was inflected: nouns changed for case, verb conjugation was intricate, and word order was far freer than it is today. It reads like a completely different language. The opening of Beowulf (circa the 8th century), "Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum", would be unknown to a modern English speaker word for word without a dictionary. Yet nearly all of the 100 most common English words today (the, and, I, to …) are native words handed down from Old English, and they carry most of everyday speech.

The North Sea period (793-1066): Vikings and a wholesale pronoun swap

In 793 the monastery of Lindisfarne was raided and the Viking Age began. In the 9th century the Danes settled the east of England (the Danelaw), and Old Norse and Old English — two closely related Germanic tongues — were used side by side on the same land for over two hundred years.

Loans from this period have identifiable signatures:

• Initial sk-: sky, skin, skirt, skill. Where Old Norse had sk-, Old English's sc- had already softened to sh, so shirt and skirt are two separate imports of the same word (native scyrte and Norse skyrta) — a pair of etymological twins.
• Hard g and k: give, get, egg — compare the twin y- forms, such as the gild / yield pair.
• Whole sets of everyday words: law, husband (Old Norse húsbóndi, "the one who lives in the house" → husband, head of the household), window (vindauga, "the eye of the wind"), same, both, wrong, call, take.

The most consequential event was the pronoun swap: Old English they (hīe), them (him) and their (hiera) sounded too close to she / them in the same sentence, so the east of England simply borrowed the Old Norse set þeir / þeim / þeira in full. An entire core pronoun set was replaced by a foreign language — an extraordinarily rare thing in the history of language. When you say they today, the word you are speaking is the Vikings'.

Middle English (1066-1500): the Norman conquest and three layers of vocabulary

After Hastings in 1066, William of Normandy was crowned king of England. For about three centuries the language of the court, the courts of law and the upper levels of manorial life was Norman French; schools used Latin; English retreated to the folk. By the time English became the official language again in the 14th century (a 1362 statute ordered the courts of law to switch to English), it had absorbed French all over the place: roughly ten thousand French words entered English during the Middle English period, concentrated in "upper life" — government, law, military affairs, fashion and food.

Food words show it most directly. The living animal was raised by an Anglo-Saxon farmer; once it reached the Norman table it had a French name:

Living animal (native)	On the table (French)
cow	beef
sheep	mutton
pig	pork
calf	veal

The same semantic fields developed three layers: a native word, a French word and a Latin word, close in meaning but different in register — kingly (native) / royal (French) / regal (Latin); ask (native) / question (French) / interrogate (Latin). The third layer still sounds the most "written" today. Legal words like court, judge, jury, evidence, parliament and governmental words like government and tax arrived in this same period.

Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales around 1387 in London dialect, and a rhyming narrative in the vernacular proved English's literary capability; in 1476 Caxton brought the printing press to Westminster and the first English book went to press. Print brought a consequence that still runs through the language: spelling was frozen while pronunciation kept moving. From that point the divorce between spelling and sound was settled (see below, The Great Vowel Shift and print). A side note: the silent l in could was added by analogy with should in the age of print.

The Great Vowel Shift and print (1400-1700)

Between roughly 1400 and 1700 the English long vowels rose across the board — the Great Vowel Shift: /aː/ rose to /eː/ and on to /eɪ/, /eː/ rose to /iː/, /oː/ rose to /uː/, and so on. Name stopped being "nah-may" and mouse stopped being "moose". Spelling had already been frozen by print around 1476, so the spelling records Chaucer's sounds while the mouth speaks Shakespeare's — this is the whole root of English's spelling-pronunciation mismatch.

The traces are still everywhere: the long/short opposition in sheep and ship (see the near-miss table on the pronunciation page), the magic-e rule (hat / hate), and the systematic difference between British and American vowels are all aftershocks of the same shift in different dialects.

Two vocabulary events of the same era:

• The Renaissance import wave (16th century): scholars lifted words straight out of Greek and Latin: encyclopedia, enthusiasm, atmosphere, skeleton, monopoly. Contemporaries mocked the neologisms as "inkhorn terms" and argued about whether they could be used; most of them survived the argument.
• Shakespeare and the King James Bible: roughly 1700 words are first attested in Shakespeare (by OED reckoning — first attested is not the same as coined by him), including eyeball and lonely; the 1611 King James Version cast phrases like salt of the earth and the root of all evil into everyday English.

Standardization and the American split (1700-1900): the dictionaries set the rules

In 1712 Swift proposed founding an English academy to regulate the language; the proposal was rejected. English still has no official academy (compare the Académie française). The real work of standardization was done by dictionaries:

• Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755): about 42,000 entries, quotations as definitions, and for a time treated as the standard of English.
• Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828): from here the American spellings color, center, defense were fixed. The color/colour split is not "Americans spelling it wrong"; it was a deliberate act of standardization in the 19th century.

The 18th-century grammars meanwhile bolted Latin rules onto English: never split the infinitive, and double negatives cancel. A fair number of "grammar rules" are the products of prescription, and the facts of the language do not always agree with them.

Empire and the global era (1600-present): the reflux and scientific coinage

Colonialism and trade turned English into a net importer after being a net exporter, and words from everywhere came ashore with the cargo:

Word	Source	Route
tea	Minnan Chinese te	By sea via the Dutch → tea; the same word went overland (Cantonese cha) into Persian and Russian → chai. One leaf, two roads.
ketchup	Minnan Chinese kôe-chiap	Originally a fermented fish sauce; tomatoes were added in America in the 19th century. The sauce is two hundred years older than tomato ketchup.
shampoo	Hindi chāmpna (to massage)	On entering English in the 18th century it meant to massage; only in the 20th century did it come to mean shampoo.
safari	Swahili ← Arabic safar (a journey)	East African hunting trips → long-distance expeditions.
bungalow	Bengali bangla	"a Bengali-style bungalow" → a single-storey cottage.
robot	Czech robota (forced labour)	Coined in Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., before any real robot existed.

Scientific coinage kept using Greek and Latin parts: telephone (fixed between the 1830s and 1870s, tēle "far" + phōnē "sound"); television is a hybrid — Greek tele- on a Latin stem visio, which the editor C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian mocked as "half Greek and half Latin, with no hope of a good result". The word survived into every living room. Internet appears in networking literature in the 1970s and came to mean the present internet after ARPANET switched to TCP/IP in 1983; the vocabulary explosion that followed — software, email, social media — is almost all recombination of native English parts (hardware, software, email) rather than a new wave of borrowing. The age of borrowing yielded to the age of word formation.

Today roughly 380 million people speak English natively, with many times that many learners; a Germanic dialect that landed on a small island in the 5th century grew into one of the most-spoken languages on earth.

Closing: three layers of one meaning

The whole story in one table. Within the same semantic field the native word is the most everyday, the French word the middle register, and the Latin (or Greek) word the most written. Meet an unknown word and first guess which layer it came from — that gives you the register:

Field	Native (Old English)	French (after 1066)	Latin / Greek (around the Renaissance)
ask	ask	question	interrogate
king	kingly	royal	regal
rise	rise	mount	ascend
heart	hearty	cordial	cardiac
fire	fire	flame	conflagration
fear	fear	terror	panic (Greek, from the god Pan)
end	end	finish	terminate
foretell	foretell	predict	prognosticate

Further reading

• Timeline: the interactive version of this general history — 33 nodes filterable by sound and writing, vocabulary and etymology, standardization and dictionaries, and exams and teaching.
• Word roots: the source stories at the level of parts of speech for that Renaissance batch of Latin and Greek loans.
• Pronunciation: why the Great Vowel Shift broke the link between spelling and sound, mapped onto the 48 phonemes.

References

• Wikipedia · English language
• Wikipedia · Etymology