Dimensions of Incoming Economic Vocabulary in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

The eighteenth century is often connected with economic improvement. Considering the significant functional expansion of the English language during this period, driven by various socio-cultural changes, and the contemporary interest in the economy, we hypothesize that this linguistic expansion facilitated the spread of economic vocabulary to new contexts. Combining linguistic and historical expertise, we study vocabulary drawn from the ‘trade and finance’ section of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary in economic texts included in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. We identify incoming economic lexis based on its rate of change and apply multi-dimensional analysis to extract four lexical dimensions of economic discourse, which we interpret as (1) public income and expenditure, (2) public debt, (3) financial system, and (4) private enterprise. The lexical items associated with the dimensions are mostly Latin or French in origin, and many of them are neologisms that are first attested in the later eighteenth century, suggesting their widespread introduction into the language around that time. We show that at the beginning of the century, the use of the items that were extant then tends to be more concrete and local, with more abstract and wide-reaching contexts added towards the end of the century. This suggests a specialization of economic discourse that is related to the emergence of political economy as a field for intellectual theorizing.