1215: The Year of Magna Carta Book

[ By 1400 there were about ten thousand French loan words in English. Chaucer, for example, used nearly five hundred words borrowed from French in the 858 lines of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales Sometimes the old word was driven out. The word stow, meaning "place," for example, no longer exists-except in some place names such as Godstow, the nunnery where Henry II's mistress, Fair Rosamund, was buried. More often both the English and French words for something continued simultaneously in use, with the English generally retaining a more common or garden sense, as in English "house" and French "mansion." Sometimes spelling changed. For instance the spelling of the modern word "queen" comes from the French combination of letters qu replacing its English equivalent cw. Also of French origin is the convention, exasperating and confusing, of using c instead of s for the ess sound in words such as "cell" or "circle." (hide spoiler)]