Communication is essential to our lives, but how often do we stop to think about where the words we use have come from? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, French or Dutch? Try admiral, landscape and marmalade just for starters. The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging account not only of the history of English, but also of how w...(展开全部)

AN "ECONOMIST" BOOK OF THE YEAR "The Secret Life of Words "is a wide-ranging account of the transplanted, stolen, bastardized words we've come to know as the English languag. It's a history of English as a whole, and of the thousands of individual words, from more than 350 foreign tongues, that trickled in gradually over hundreds of years of trade, colonization, and diplomacy. ...(展开全部)

Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Try "admiral," "lands...(展开全部)

The world's foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages. In this entertaining history of the world's most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular sinc...(展开全部)

The world's foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages. In this entertaining history of the world's most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular sinc...(展开全部)

David Crystal works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1941, he spent his early years in Holyhead. His family moved to Liverpool in 1951, and he received his secondary schooling at St Mary's College. He read English at University College London (1959-62), specialised in English language st...(展开全部)

This is a wonderful collection of words and pictures to share and talk about. The pages are packed with 1000 really useful everyday words, each matched with a detailed and amusing picture to make learning new words easy and fun.

The world's foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages. In this entertaining history of the world's most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular sinc...(展开全部)

The world's foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages. In this entertaining history of the world's most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular sinc...(展开全部)

David Crystal works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1941, he spent his early years in Holyhead. His family moved to Liverpool in 1951, and he received his secondary schooling at St Mary's College. He read English at University College London (1959-62), specialised in English language st...(展开全部)