📚 The English Language

From three Germanic dialects to a global tongue: its histories, and the OED that documents the drift.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject english language in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Elements of Style	William Strunk, Jr.	1920	288
	English grammar	Lindley Murray	1795	126
	Abridgment of Murray's English Grammar	Lindley Murray	1800	118
	Write It Right	Ambrose Bierce	1909	118
	Longman Reading World	Wendy Body	1987	94
	How to Speak and Write Correctly	Joseph Devlin	1910	68
	Grammatical institute of the English language. Part 1	Noah Webster	1788	65
	Style	Joseph M. Williams	1981	44
	Wordsmith - A Guide to College Writing	Pamela Arlov	1999	43
	Nelson Spelling	John Jackman	1997	41
	On Writing Well	William Knowlton Zinsser	1976	33
	The Mother Tongue	Bill Bryson	1656	29
	Made in America	Bill Bryson	1994	29
	Caribbean Language Arts Project	St.Lucia Ministry of Education	1987	28
	Our language	Simeon Potter	1950	27
	30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary	Wilfred John Funk	1942	25
	The Abolition of Man	C. S. Lewis	1943	24
	A history of the English language	Albert Croll Baugh	1935	23
	Noblesse oblige	Nancy Mitford	1956	23
	The Gregg Reference Manual	William A. Sabin	1970	23
	Steps to writing well	Jean Wyrick	1979	23
	Speed reading	Tony Buzan	1971	22
	A Writer's Reference	Diana Hacker	1989	22
	A practical English grammar	A. J. Thomson	1964	21
	English Grammar and Composition	John E. Warriner	1963	19
	Look, listen and learn!	L. G. Alexander	1968	17
	The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation	Jane Straus	1997	17
	The St. Martin's Guide to Writing	Rise B. Axelrod	1985	16
	Slang to-day and yesterday	Eric Partridge	1933	15
	Eating the Alphabet	Lois Ehlert	1989	15

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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