In the seventeenth century, English began acquiring tools that would change how people learned and trusted words. A schoolmaster published a dictionary for readers puzzled by unfamiliar vocabulary. Translators produced a Bible that would be read for centuries. Shakespeare’s fellow actors gathered his plays into a great book. Scientists developed new methods of sharing observations through journals. Meanwhile, English travelled across the Atlantic in a history inseparable from colonisation and the languages already spoken there.
What happened to the English language between 1600 and 1700 CE? Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall appeared in 1604, the King James Bible in 1611, Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 and the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1665. None of these events created English. Together, they helped turn it into a better documented language of education, literature, religion and experimental inquiry.
This is a century of books that refuse to remain mere books. A dictionary helps readers cross a vocabulary gap. A Bible brings complex texts into a shared vernacular. A play survives its author’s death. A scientific journal lets one observer learn from another. And as English moves across oceans, it enters new contact situations, sometimes through deeply unequal colonial institutions. Follow the books, and you begin to see a language growing into a new set of social responsibilities.
Explore the history in greater depth: How English Became a Language of Modern Science. See how the Royal Society, Newton’s books and later scientific authors developed new ways of explaining evidence.
How ordinary grammar was changing: Why English Questions Use Do follows the historical growth of auxiliary do, does and did, with practical comparisons of questions, negatives and emphatic statements. These changes developed gradually during the Early Modern period, not through one grammar reform.
A book for anyone who meets a difficult word
Imagine reading a printed text and encountering a word that looks important but leaves you uncertain about its meaning. You might ask a better educated friend, compare passages or simply guess.
Now imagine someone decides that readers need a book to solve precisely that problem.
In 1604, the schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall. It is widely described as the first monolingual English dictionary: a book explaining selected difficult English words in English.
Its scope was very different from a modern desk dictionary. It focused particularly on unfamiliar words, many borrowed from learned or prestigious languages. It did not attempt to record every regional expression or every ordinary verb.
That limitation is part of its significance. Cawdrey identified a practical difficulty produced by expanding reading and vocabulary: knowing English as a spoken language did not mean knowing every English word appearing in print.
The dictionary was an educational tool. It helped readers overcome a gap between recognising letters and understanding meanings.
A dictionary is not a language police officer
It is tempting to imagine that the first dictionary arrived with a declaration of correct English.
Cawdrey’s project was more modest. A dictionary can select words, explain meanings and offer spellings; it does not automatically control every speaker.
The actual language existed in communities long before any dictionary entry described it. People borrowed expressions, invented forms and used words in ways not yet recorded in printed reference books.
A dictionary is therefore a snapshot, a collection of decisions made by editors and a resource for readers. Its authority grows when users find it helpful, not simply because it is bound between covers.
The history of English lexicography is the history of increasingly ambitious attempts to record a system that keeps changing.
The seventeenth-century question is especially interesting because printing had made more words accessible while simultaneously exposing more readers to unfamiliar vocabulary.
A useful reference book could reduce the distance between a text and its intended audience.
How much English could anyone possibly know?
A language has several overlapping vocabularies. We use familiar words daily, recognise other words when reading, and occasionally meet technical expressions restricted to a particular field.
No individual needs to know them all. Knowledge varies by occupation, education, region, reading habits and experience.
A medical practitioner may use terms unknown to a merchant. A scholar may read Latin phrases that ordinary readers rarely encounter. A sailor may know a large stock of specialised maritime vocabulary.
The spread of printing made these differences more visible. Books carried the language of one profession or community into the hands of another.
A dictionary could then serve as a bridge between specialised and everyday usage.
This remains a central task of English education: not memorising as many impressive words as possible, but knowing which meaning is appropriate to a particular text.
Vocabulary becomes useful when it allows a reader to understand, question and act on information.
The Bible becomes a major English institution
In 1611, a new English Bible appeared under the authority of King James I. It is now commonly called the King James Version or Authorised Version.
It was not the first English Bible. Earlier translation traditions included the Wycliffite Bibles, Tyndale, Coverdale and the Geneva Bible, among others.
The 1611 work arose from committees of translators and a much longer history of scholarship, controversy and previous English texts.
The Folger Shakespeare Library’s material on the 1611 title page explains the royal commission and the work’s contemporary presentation.
Its importance lies partly in longevity. Through repeated printing, teaching and worship, its language became familiar to many generations of readers.
A widely read text can supply phrases and rhythms that speakers reuse beyond its original context.
But influence should not be mistaken for universal acceptance. Different communities used different biblical texts, and the history of English religious language remained contested.
Why translation changes a civilisation
Translation is a form of knowledge transfer.
A source text has words, grammatical relationships, cultural references and interpretations. A translator must decide how much of that structure to preserve and how much explanation an audience needs.
An apparently simple word may carry several possible meanings. A sentence may make a distinction that the target language normally expresses in another way.
A translation cannot succeed by replacing every source word with the first dictionary equivalent. It needs to preserve the relationships that make the whole passage meaningful.
Bible translation made those questions socially and politically consequential. Readers and religious authorities disagreed about wording because wording influenced interpretation.
The King James Bible exemplifies a recurring pattern in English history: institutions give a text repeated circulation, and repeated circulation gives some expressions unusual staying power.
The same process happens in education, law and scientific writing, although each field develops different standards for checking meaning.
Shakespeare’s plays need saving
William Shakespeare died in 1616. Seven years later, a group of people connected with his theatrical career helped produce the first collected edition of his plays.
The First Folio, published in 1623, is one of the most important books in English literary history.
According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, it is the sole early source for approximately half the plays it contains. Without it, some celebrated works might not survive in their familiar forms.
This was not the first time any Shakespeare play appeared in print. Many had been printed individually in smaller quarto editions.
The Folio mattered because it gathered a large dramatic collection in one substantial volume, creating a new opportunity for preservation and reading.
The book’s production also involved decisions by editors, printers and people who had known the theatrical company.
What later generations received was not simply the author’s voice captured without mediation. It was a book made through an institution of publishing.
A printed text can survive its original performance
Theatre is a living event. An actor speaks, an audience responds and the moment passes.
A printed play separates the words from that moment, making the work available to people who were never in the theatre.
But the process has complications. A printed script may differ from a version performed onstage. Editors must decide how to treat punctuation, stage directions and competing textual witnesses.
Shakespeare’s First Folio shows the enormous value—and the limitations—of durable reproduction.
Preservation is not the same as perfect fidelity. Copying can save a work, but errors, choices and changes may enter the record.
The history of English literature is therefore also a history of how people decide which words count as the text.
That problem will eventually become familiar in editions, archives and digital libraries. Its earliest modern forms were already being confronted by printers in London.
A language travels to North America
In 1607, English colonists established Jamestown in Virginia, in a territory already inhabited by Indigenous peoples, including communities within Powhatan’s political network.
The US National Park Service describes Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in North America, while emphasising that the region had a long and complex Indigenous history before the colonists arrived.
English did not reach a silent landscape. People there already used languages to conduct diplomacy, trade, manage communities and preserve knowledge.
Contact produced attempts at translation, negotiation and sometimes misunderstanding. English names and records frequently described events from colonial viewpoints rather than representing all the perspectives involved.
The story also included military conflict, dispossession, forced labour and, from the seventeenth century, the growth of slavery in English colonial America.
English’s later geographical reach cannot be explained responsibly without that history.
A language can spread because people find it useful, but it can also spread through institutions that impose unequal costs on speakers of other languages.
What happens when different languages meet?
Picture two communities with different words for a local plant.
One community has known the plant for generations. The newcomers want to name it, trade it or understand how it is used.
They may borrow a local term, apply an older English name or invent a new expression. Each choice has consequences for what the word communicates.
Some English vocabulary associated with the Americas entered through contact with Indigenous languages. Individual etymologies, however, must be checked rather than guessed from the apparent novelty of an object.
Language contact can be cooperative, hostile or unequal, and often involves several of those relationships at once.
A borrowed word is evidence of linguistic interaction, not proof that the surrounding history was peaceful.
The geographical history of English becomes a history of cultural contact, and the ethical consequences of that contact belong in the account alongside its vocabulary.
English begins to develop away from England
When English-speaking settlers establish communities across an ocean, their language does not remain perfectly frozen.
New environments create new naming demands. Speakers interact with neighbours, migrants and later generations whose experiences differ from those of their ancestors.
Over time, pronunciations, meanings and social conventions may diverge. Some older forms survive longer in one community while changing in another.
That is how distinct varieties can develop without anyone formally announcing the creation of a new language.
In the seventeenth century, the long history of English in North America was still beginning. It would later involve settlers from different regions of Britain, enslaved Africans and their descendants, Indigenous communities and many other populations.
We should not project a fully formed modern American accent into Jamestown in 1607.
English was travelling into conditions that would eventually produce new Englishes.
England’s own politics divide the century
The century within England was hardly one uninterrupted era of stability.
Conflict between the monarchy and Parliament escalated into the English Civil Wars, beginning in 1642. Charles I was executed in 1649. The monarchy was restored in 1660.
These political changes affected censorship, publishing, religious argument and the uses of public persuasion.
A pamphlet might try to recruit support. A sermon could justify a political position. A printed argument could circulate beyond the room in which it was first delivered.
English was becoming a more powerful language of mass political disagreement through print, although literacy and access remained unequal.
Political writing is not automatically accurate because it sounds confident. Writers select evidence, name opponents and frame events to support their causes.
The seventeenth century gives readers many reasons to ask whose words they are encountering, what the writer wants and what other perspectives have been excluded.
Milton asks what freedom can mean
John Milton is one of the defining literary figures of the century.
His prose addressed political, religious and cultural questions. His epic Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, used English verse to explore themes of obedience, rebellion, free will and human limitation.
The work was not written in the Old English of the Anglo-Saxon period. It belongs to the Early Modern English literary world, with a complex relationship to classical traditions.
Its scale is striking. A language that had once been a group of regional Germanic varieties was capable of sustaining an ambitious poem informed by international intellectual history.
That achievement did not depend on English abandoning its ancestry. Writers drew on inherited structures and borrowed learning to create new forms.
A language is not limited to the work its earliest surviving documents happened to record.
It develops new genres when people have both the ability and the social reasons to write them.
The Royal Society changes how knowledge is shared
The Royal Society began meeting as a learned organisation in 1660. Its members studied natural phenomena through observation, experiment, correspondence and discussion.
Many of its early participants were educated men from the professional and aristocratic classes. The institution was not an inclusive representation of every kind of knowledge or every member of society.
Yet it created mechanisms through which observations could be circulated and compared.
A person in one location could describe an experiment. Others might examine the methods, repeat the work or challenge the claim.
The Society’s records and correspondence helped build a network where information could move beyond the original observer.
That makes scientific communication a language problem as well as a scientific one.
A report needs to explain what was measured, how it was measured and what the evidence supports.
The year 1665 is especially important
In March 1665, Henry Oldenburg launched Philosophical Transactions, closely linked to the Royal Society.
The Royal Society describes it as the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal, initially produced by Oldenburg as a personal editorial enterprise rather than a journal already managed directly by the Society in its later form.
The publication included accounts of experiments, observations, new books and contributions from a network of correspondents.
A reader could learn about work being done by people they had never met.
This is a new scale of scientific memory. A finding can be recorded, circulated, attributed and compared against other reports.
Scientific writing creates an obligation: readers need enough information to distinguish what the author observed from what the author merely inferred.
The ideal would continue developing over subsequent centuries; modern peer review should not simply be projected unchanged onto the journal’s first issue.
But the basic principle of published, accountable knowledge was becoming more visible.
Hooke’s microscope makes the invisible discussable
Also in 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, a work containing detailed observations of things seen with magnifying instruments.
The Royal Society preserves material associated with this influential book.
Imagine looking at an unfamiliar microscopic structure. You must decide what to call it, how to describe its shape and how to persuade a reader that the image represents something real.
A drawing can help, but it does not eliminate the need for language. The writer needs to distinguish the observed features from guesses about their causes.
Scientific prose therefore has to manage evidence, uncertainty and explanation.
This demand helps cultivate specialised vocabulary and more explicit conventions for reporting methods and findings.
The English language becomes a tool for examining the natural world through a community of readers who are not all present at the original experiment.
Its capacity grows with the institutions and technologies supporting it.
Did the Royal Society invent plain English?
A popular simplified account says the Royal Society decided that all English science must become plain, direct and free of metaphor.
The historical development of scientific style is far more complicated.
Scientific authors continued to use Latin, English and other languages in different contexts. Writing styles varied, and figurative expression did not instantly disappear.
The Society’s importance lies in practices of observation, communication and publication rather than in one universal rule that abolished rhetorical flourishes.
What increasingly mattered was the ability to explain a claim so others could examine it.
A scientist who writes a beautiful sentence but omits the method may leave readers unable to test the conclusion. Another who presents careful measurements without explaining their relevance can also fail to communicate.
Effective scientific English needs precision, scope and intelligibility. Those qualities developed through communities of practice, not simply through a decree about style.
London burns, and someone writes it down
The Great Fire of London began in September 1666, destroying a large part of the city.
The diary of Samuel Pepys records the event from the perspective of someone observing a rapidly changing situation.
A diary is a fascinating kind of evidence. Unlike an official summary written after an event, it may preserve day-by-day reactions, incomplete information and changing judgments.
Yet a diary is still written from one person’s position. It does not tell the whole city’s story.
When a reader compares a firsthand account with later research, the difference between observation and historical interpretation becomes visible.
English could preserve not only public proclamations but an individual’s uncertainty during a crisis.
The act of writing gives later generations access to thoughts they could never otherwise have heard.
That capacity is central to the historical record of every era.
The Restoration stage finds new voices
After 1660, theatres reopened under the restored monarchy, and the English stage developed new repertoires and social conventions.
Women were permitted to perform professionally on the English public stage, a major change from the earlier practice in which female roles were generally played by boys or men.
Writers such as Aphra Behn became prominent in the later seventeenth century. Her plays and prose contributed to a literary culture in which women were increasingly visible as professional authors, despite substantial social barriers.
The shift did not create equality overnight. Publishing, patronage and education remained structured by power and opportunity.
Still, it expanded the kinds of voices that could appear in written and performed English.
A language does not have one social owner. Its literary record becomes richer as different people gain ways to participate.
The history of English is therefore also a history of whose words are allowed to circulate and survive.
What would a seventeenth-century English speaker sound like?
A reader of a seventeenth-century book can often recognise substantial portions of the text, but that does not mean its spoken pronunciation matched any single modern accent.
The Great Vowel Shift and other phonological developments had altered many pronunciations over preceding centuries, with further variation among places and speakers.
Spelling had become more repeatable through print in some contexts, but it did not map neatly onto every spoken sound.
Old terms could carry meanings different from those most familiar today. A word in Shakespeare, Milton or a scientific report may need its historical context to be understood correctly.
The language also possessed regional differences and social registers.
We should not imagine a country where everyone spoke in the same stage accent. The surviving printed standard represents only selected forms of a larger linguistic landscape.
Language history becomes more accurate when we separate speech, spelling and literature rather than treating them as one identical system.
The century’s central dates
1604: Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall, a pioneering monolingual English dictionary.
1607: English colonists established Jamestown amid Indigenous communities in the Chesapeake region.
1611: the King James Bible was published.
1623: Shakespeare’s First Folio brought together his plays.
1642–1649: civil war and revolution transformed English political life.
1660: the monarchy was restored and the Royal Society began its learned meetings.
1665: Philosophical Transactions and Hooke’s Micrographia appeared.
1666: the Great Fire of London was recorded by contemporary writers including Samuel Pepys.
1667: Milton’s Paradise Lost was published.
These dates concern books, institutions and events, not the sudden birth of one uniform English.
Frequently asked questions
What was the first English dictionary?
Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, is usually described as the first monolingual English dictionary. Earlier bilingual dictionaries and other reference traditions existed.
Was the King James Bible the first English Bible?
No. It appeared in 1611 after centuries of English biblical translation, including Tyndale, Coverdale and Geneva editions.
When was Shakespeare’s First Folio published?
The First Folio appeared in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. It preserves many plays that might otherwise have been lost.
When did English become a language of scientific journals?
One major milestone was the launch of Philosophical Transactions in 1665. Scientific communication continued in several European languages, and its publishing conventions evolved over time.
Did English first reach America in 1607?
English exploration and attempted settlement in North America preceded 1607. Jamestown was the first enduring English colonial settlement there, established in a region already rich in Indigenous languages and cultures.
Did seventeenth-century English have fixed spelling and pronunciation?
No. Printed conventions were becoming more widely shared, while pronunciation, vocabulary and writing habits continued to vary and change.
Next: people begin arguing about the rules
The eighteenth century will bring a new concern: can English be made stable, teachable and respectable through dictionaries and grammars?
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary will appear in 1755. Grammarians will debate accepted usage. Across the Atlantic, new political communities will develop their own ideas about English identity and education.
The central question will become increasingly clear: should a dictionary record what people do with a language, or tell them what they ought to do?
Continue from 1500–1600 CE: Shakespeare, English Bibles and the Sounds of a New Age, or visit the History of English & Language Change overview.
Sources and further reading
- Folger Shakespeare Library: King James Bible Exhibition Materials — the publication and title page of the 1611 Bible.
- Folger Shakespeare Library: The First Folio — the 1623 collection and manuscript transmission.
- The Royal Society: History of the Society — the 1660 founding and learned culture.
- The Royal Society: History of Philosophical Transactions — the journal’s origin in 1665.
- The Royal Society: Catalogue of Hooke’s Micrographia — the 1665 book.
- US National Park Service: From Contact to Present, Indigenous Chesapeake — Jamestown and Indigenous histories.
- US National Park Service: Colonial National Historical Park — the 1607 colony and its historical setting.