Key English Texts Across Time

Flowchart nodes

• Old English  450 - 1100

• Middle English  1100 - 1500

• Early Modern English 1500 - 1700

• 1586 The first grammar of English—William Bullokar's Pamphlet for Grammar is published.

• 1590-1611 William Shakespeare writes his Sonnets and the majority of his plays.

• 1604 Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, the first English dictionary is published. 

• 1611 The Authorized Version of the English Bible (the "King James" Bible) is published, greatly influencing the development of the written language.

• 1622 Weekly News, the first English newspaper, is published in London.

• 1667 John Milton publishes his epic poem Paradise Lost.

• 1697 In his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe calls for the creation of an Academy of 36 "gentlemen" to dictate English usage.

• Late Modern English

• 1702 The Daily Courant, the first regular daily newspaper in English, is published in London.

• 1709 The first Copyright Act is enacted in England.

• 1712 Anglo-Irish satirist and cleric Jonathon Swift proposes the creation of an English Academy to regulate English usage and "ascertain" the language.

• 1715 Elisabeth Elstob publishes the first grammar of Old English.

• 1755 Samuel Johnson publishes his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language.

• 1760-1795 This period marks the rise of the English grammarians whose rule books, primarily based on prescriptive notions of grammar, become increasingly popular. 

• 1762 Robert Lowth publishes his Short Introduction to English Grammar.

• Mid 19th century A standard variety of American English develops. English is established in Australia, South Africa, India, and other British colonial outposts.

• 1150 Approximate date of the earliest surviving texts in Middle English.

• Beowulf- composed by an anonymous poet between the 8th century and the early 11th century.

• 1387 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is first published

• Late Modern English 1900 - Present

• 1906 Henry and Francis Fowler publish the first edition of The King's English.

• 1919 H. L. Menken publishes the first edition of The American Language, a pioneer study in the history of a major national version of English.

• 1925 The New Yorker magazine is founded by Harold Ross and Jane Grant.

• 1925 George P. Krapp publishes his two-volume The English Language in America, the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the subject.

• 1926 Henry Fowler publishes the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

• 1928 The Oxford English Dictionary is published.

• 1950 Kenneth Burke publishes A Rhetoric of Motives.

• 1957 Noam Chomsky publishes Syntactic Structures, a key document in the study of generative and transformational grammar.  

• 1972 A Grammar of Contemporary English (by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik) is published. The first call on a personal cell phone is made. The first email is sent.

• 1978 The Linguistic Atlas of England is published.

• 1981 The first issue of the journal World Englishes is published.

• 1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language is published by Longman. The first edition of M.A.K. Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar is published.

• 1988 The Internet (under development for more than 20 years) is opened to commercial interests.

• 1989 The second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary is published.

• 1994 Text messaging is introduced, and the first modern blogs go online.

• 1995 David Crystal publishes The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

• 1997 The first social networking site (SixDegrees.com) is launched. (Friendster is introduced in 2002, and both MySpace and Facebook begin operating in 2004.)

• 2000 The Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) is made available to subscribers.

• 2002 Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum publish The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Tom McArthur publishes The Oxford Guide to World English.

• 2009 The two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is published by Oxford University Press.

• 2012 The fifth volume (SI-Z) of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE ) is published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.