The Renaissance marked a new great period of vocabulary expansion dictated by the need for new words to express the widening experiences and ideas of a rapidly developing nation. In the sixteenth century the influx of Latinate borrowings sparkled the “inkhorn controversy” – a heated discussion of the extent, to which it was permissible and proper to import words into English from other languages.

Many of the debate participants took a disapproving attitude. For example, in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, George Puttenham, an English courtier and the author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), one of the most important critical works of the Elizabethan age, complained about the excessive use of “inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the Latin,” just as Thomas Wilson had earlier railed in his Art of Rhetorique (1553) against those who “seeke so far for outlandish English that they forget altogether their mothers language.”

The controversy was, in effect, a debate about ways and means, by which functional elaboration of the vernacular could be achieved. The Elizabethans were beginning to take greater pride in their mother tongue as an important expression of national identity. Writers and poets no longer agreed with the earlier conception of the vernacular as an inadequate and humble linguistic medium and strove to assert the equality of their own language and literature with those of antiquity.

One way to secure that eloquence, which had traditionally been associated with the classical tongues, was by borrowing from the classical languages, as well as prestigious contemporary sources, such as French and Italian. Some writers who adopted this strategy sometimes went too far. It is possible to find samples of the sixteenth-century prose where loans are so plentiful that the passage can hardly be recognized as English. A splendid example of the genuine use of inkhorn terms of French and Latin origin can be found, for instance, in a formal dedication from the preface to A. Boorde’s Dyetary (1542-7):