The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English
By Henry Hitchings
John Murray £16.99, 440 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

The title of this book, The Secret Life of Words, is something of a misnomer. There is no “secret” about our language; you can read all about it in the Oxford English Dictionary. A happier phrase, used by the author Henry Hitchings in the book, is “lexical archaeology”. In a more or less chronological narrative of the many accretions – home-grown, European, far-fetched – that have swelled the vast English vocabulary, Hitchings picks out the best sites for further excavation.