At the end of the 16th Century, mother-tongue English speakers numbered just 5-7 million, almost all of them in the British Isles over the next 350 years, this increased almost 50-fold, 80% of them living outside of Britain. The British Empire at its height (in pink)Д«ritish colonialism had begun as early as the 16th Century, but gathered speed and momentum between the 18th and 20th Century. railway, horsepower, typewriter, cityscape, airplane, etc).

vacuum, cylinder, apparatus, pump, syphon, locomotive, factory, etc), and new words created by amalgamating and fusing existing English words into a descriptive combination were particularly popular (e.g. In some cases, old words were given entirely new meanings and connotation (e.g. train, engine, reservoir, pulley, combustion, piston, hydraulic, condenser, electricity, telephone, telegraph, lithograph, camera, etc). Many more new words were coined for the new products, machines and processes that were developed at this time (e.g. Lens, refraction, electron, chromosome, chloroform, caffeine, centigrade, bacteria, chronometer and claustrophobia are just a few of the other science-based words that were created during this period of scientific innovation, along with a whole host of вЂњ-ologiesвЂќ and вЂњ-onomiesвЂќ, like biology, petrology, morphology, histology, palaeontology, ethnology, entomology, taxonomy, etc. Although words like oxygen, protein, nuclear and vaccine did not exist in the classical languages, they could be (and were) created from Latin and Greek roots. To a large extent, this relied on the classical languages, Latin and Greek, in which scholars and scientists of the period were usually well versed. The industrial and scientific advances of the Industrial Revolution created a need for neologisms to describe the new creations and discoveries.

Another English speaking country, the USA, continued the English language dominance of new technology and innovation with inventions like electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the sewing machine, the computer, etc. At least half of the influential scientific and technological output between 17 was written in English. Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century were of British origin, including the harnessing of steam to drive heavy machinery, the development of new materials, techniques and equipment in a range of manufacturing industries, and the emergence of new means of transportation (e.g. No single one of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th Century could have established English as a world language, but together they did just that. Late Modern English accumulated many more words as a result of two main historical factors: the Industrial Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed and the rise of the British Empire, during which time English adopted many foreign words and made them its own. The dates may be rather arbitrary, but the main distinction between Early Modern and Late Modern English (or just Modern English as it is sometimes referred to) lies in its vocabulary - pronunciation, grammar and spelling remained largely unchanged. (from How Stuff Works, original from Getty Images) Steam-powered looms were just one of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution The Industrial and Scientific Revolution | Colonialism and the British Empire | The New World | American Dialect | Black English | BritainвЂ™s Other Colonies | Language Reform | Literary Developments | 20th Century | Present Day The History of English - Late Modern English (c.

Another word for many years ago