Words and Their Ways
in English Speech

THE OLDEST TEXT IN THE COLLECTION by date of first publication — copyright 1900 and 1901 by Macmillan, renewed 1928 and 1929 by the authors; this copy is the MACMILLAN PAPERBACKS EDITION of 1961, $1.95. Two Harvard philologists on the life of English words. The preface is a period piece worth quoting: “The practical man, who rides in electric cars, talks by the long-distance telephone, and dictates his letters to a stenographer, seldom has time to think that he is the heir of all the ages. Yet … there are moments when the amazing phenomenon of articulate speech comes home to him as a kind of commonplace miracle.” It acknowledges a debt to the great Oxford Dictionary and to Professor Skeat.