The Secret Life of Words

Henry c’s humanities reference book The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English (2008) is a chronological, linguistic, and social history of the English language. Celebrating and criticizing our linguistic heritage, it highlights the unusual origins of common words and phrases. The Secret Life of Words won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 2009 Somerset Maugham Award. Specializing in narrative nonfiction, Hitchings is particularly interested in the hidden links between language and cultural history. The Secret Life of Words is his second book.

Every day, English speakers use words borrowed from more than 350 different languages. The English language, or lexicon, has a rich and diverse cultural history, It’s important for speakers to understand where the language comes from; by understanding our linguistic roots, we can better understand our own social heritage.

Hitchings emphasizes the importance of language and communication. Although we talk to each other using gestures and other nonverbal cues, we communicate mainly by speaking, listening to, or reading words. Language, then, is central to everything we do.



Words have a unique way of bringing everyone together, regardless of social class, gender, or life experience. For example, clichés, old sayings, and expressions give us something in common. For Hitchings, language gives us a sense of solidarity that we cannot get anywhere else.

Hitchings describes how foreign words made their way into the English lexicon, often through colonialization and conflict. Although he doesn’t take a stance on the morality of our linguistic history, he is truthful about where some of our most common words and phrases come from.

Looking back at the oldest English words, the Anglo-Saxon lexicon, and their possible origins, Hitchings considers how English evolved to include Norse, Latin, and Celtic words, largely due to power shifts, conflict, and imperial expansion across Europe and elsewhere.



Hitchings examines what happens when the English language meets other native European lexicons, and how language evolved at a rapid rate. As English-speaking colonizers spread their influence across the world, they invented—or borrowed—countless new words and phrases to describe new objects, surroundings, and so on.

The size of a society’s vocabulary and the words used give us insight into what is important to that society. For example, we might invent new words and phrases during periods of scientific enlightenment, and we might devise new names for art, dance, and music during significant cultural movements. By looking at when words entered our vocabulary, we can learn a great deal about society’s needs at that time.

Our own personal vocabulary tells other people a lot about us, Hitchings claims. For example, it can often reveal our age, social class, and status. Furthermore, although our vocabularies grow as we age, and children are highly receptive to new words and phrases, it is often one of the first faculties we lose as senior citizens. As a result, our ability to use language reveals much about our cognitive health.



In The Secret Life of Words, Hitchings touches on how authors and other literary figures have shaped the English language. For example, the word “pandemonium” didn’t exist before John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Samuel Coleridge invented the word “pessimism.” We are always looking for new ways to express ourselves, and as a result, language is constantly evolving.

What is especially interesting about language, according to Hitchings, is that it reveals society’s current social, technological, and scientific limits. We use words and phrases to identify the previously unidentifiable. If words didn’t exist a thousand years ago, for example, it’s because they weren’t necessary. Words we commonly use every day, such as words and phrases for technology, were unheard of just a few decades ago. As society continues to evolve and grow, we can expect hundreds, if not thousands of new words to enter the lexicon. It is impossible to guess what these words will be because we don’t yet understand our future needs.

Hitchings finds the continued evolution of the English lexicon an exciting, though also daunting, prospect. The reality is, one day, the English language might be unrecognizable to us living in the present. This is another example of how language reflects the needs and desires of its society.



Hitchings accepts that studying the lexicon involves more than just understanding language. To fully appreciate the English lexicon, we must also understand regional dialects, nuances, syntax, and punctuation. Hitchings doesn’t attempt to cover all this ground in The Secret Life of Words, but he does note that formalities such as English punctuation aren’t borrowed from other languages.