Without considering the immense number of words that we have constantly borrowed from every language with which English-speaking people have been in contact, we owe a large volume of our words to the period that we call "Modern English", beginning, roughly, with the sixteenth century.
Scholarship, previously limited largely to the clergy, was opened to just about every one, and the study of classical learning became the ultimate way to be educated.
Writers and thinkers sprang up from every walk of life, and did not hesitate to select, or to choose, their words from the Latin of Cicero, or Horace, or Ovid, or Seneca.
Many also went to the Greek of Aeschylus, or Plato, or Plutarch to derive their words. It is thus chiefly through these writers and their unceasing stream of successors that the great bulk of words derived directly from Latin and Greek ancestry and meanings have entered our language.
From this practice also has descended our present custom of looking to one or another of those languages for the formation of new words, especially those of scientific nature.
Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Prefixes
