Neoclassical borrowings: the “Hard Words” in English

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed major changes, due to the massive influx of words and new coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum), considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such hard words, often attested there for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of these words remained in the language and shaped the structure of English vocabulary, also thanks to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from hard words dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.