First published in 1937, this book supplies a history of the living growth of the language from Old English to medieval times. It offers an in-depth study of the growth of vocabulary from literature and social interaction, bringing out the fact that it is words chiefly that foreign influence has affected, and the it has left the structure of the sentence almost unaltered. Isolative and combinative changes in phonology, the accidence of nouns and plurals, pronouns and adverbs, and verbs are also looked at in detail along with a general overview of the features of the Middle English period and a brief overview of each dialect's most striking characteristics.