The Story of English in 100 Words

Evie took one look at this book and said, 'But this is longer than a hundred words... Ohhhh, right, okay.'

In a neat conceit, linguist David Crystal makes a survey of one hundred English words, starting with the rune for 'roe' scratched on a deer bone, possibly the earliest written word in English ever found, and moving through the centuries to take in 'lea' (a clearing, a word element which survives in countless place- and surnames, like Bromley or Dunkley), 'potato', 'jazz' and up to 'twittersphere' in the twenty-first century. He manages to cover much of the same ground as Mother Tongue -- borrowings from other languages, truncations and elaborations, swear words and technical terms. But with only a couple of pages available for each word, this ends up being more of a skim than a delve.

A quick, fun and informative read that will probably leave the reader wanting more.