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Bookish Words & Their Surprising Stories
Hardcover
Business of WritingDictionaries & EncyclopediasLinguistics
Publisher Price: $25.00
ISBN13: 9781851246519
Publisher: Bodleian Library
Published: Jun 20 2025
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.70 Width: 4.90 Depth: 7.40
Language: English
Travel through time with words that have shaped the trajectory of the English language across centuries.
The world of books has played a striking role in the history of English vocabulary. Book itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from boc in Old English, and appears in many commonly used expressions today, including by the book, bring to book, and bookworm, to name a few.
With the arrival of printing and typesetting, and the development of the newspaper industry came terminology that birthed commonly used phrases such as stop the press, front-page news, and hit the headlines. The emergence of the internet generated even more.
This anthology presents a selection of more than one hundred words that show the influence of writing, reading, and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time.
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