Reading Early Modern literature through OED3

We may think we know what a neologism is, but it is hard to isolate the nature of the moment in which neologizing occurs. In literature sometimes this moment is enacted for effects that may not belong to the discourses of normal communication, and these effects are compounded when it is a loan-neologism. The Early Modern period was one of increasing contact between the languages of Europe, and literature responded to this in a variety of ways. This paper looks at neologistic borrowings into English literature, using a selection of canonical authors as refracted through the Oxford English Dictionary, to see if they can tell us something about the porousness of literary language in this period. Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary; Shakespeare; Jonson; Dryden; Skelton; loan word; neologism

Published online: 05 April 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.6.1.02goo