Modern Englishn.adj.

1680 Bp. G. Burnet Some Passages Life Earl of Rochester 7 He [John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester] had made himself Master of the Ancient and Modern Wit, and of the Modern French and Italian as well as the English.]

1700 J. Dryden Fables Pref. sig. *Cij I find some People are offended that I have turn'd these Tales into modern English; because they think them unworthy of my Pains.

1753 C. Smart Hilliad i, in Poems (1791) I. 186 (note) As soon as the Philosopher here mentioned discovered the modern Save-all, and the New-invented patent black-ball, he threw down his pipe, and ran all along Piccadilly, with his shirt out of his breeches, crying out like a madman, eureka! eureka! which in modern English is, the job is done! the job is done!

1755 Gentleman's Mag. Apr. 150/1 An history of our language, in which it is regularly traced from the old Gothic and Teutonic to modern English.

1845 S. Judd Margaret ii. iii. 248 Rendered in modern English, holiness and righteousness, mean goodness, virtue, rectitude, or any high moral and religious excellence.

1860 G. P. Marsh Lect. Eng. Lang. xxv. 560 Although half-rhyme may be said to be peculiar to Icelandic poetry,..yet there are examples of the employment of both full and imperfect line-rhymes in modern English.

1876 E. A. Freeman Hist. Norman Conquest V. xxv. 509 Had no Norman ever set foot on our shores, the inflexional Old-English would still have passed, sooner or later, into the non-inflexional modern English.

1892 Daily News 26 Sept. 2/4 To erect a roomy theatre of varieties—which seems to be modern English for music hall.

1904 H. Poutsma (title) A grammar of Late Modern English, for the use of Continental, especially Dutch, students.

1920 H. C. Wyld Hist. Mod. Colloq. Eng. iv. 115 Hitherto writers upon the history of Modern English have relied mainly upon the Orthoepists.

1933 L. Bloomfield Lang. i. 17 By comparing our records of Old English (say, in the writings of King Alfred) with modern English, we can see how English has changed in the last thousand years.

1935 G. O. Curme Gram. Eng. Lang. II. xii. 307 In early Modern English there was alongside of the long-voweled bete or beat the short-voweled bett.

1940 C. C. Fries in Language 16 199 (heading) On the development of the structural use of word-order in modern English.

1960 C. S. Lewis Stud. in Words vi. 133 In modern English the two meanings are not at all related as parent and child. They can be explained only by the pre-English history of the word.

1972 M. L. Samuels Linguistic Evol. vii. 144 For Early Modern English, there is much orthoepist, phonetic and other evidence.

1987 Multilingua 6 321 A few remnants of verb-second order remain in modern English including..placing the auxiliary second after an interrogative or negative.

a1831 J. Stoddart Gram. in Encycl. Metrop. (1845) I. 73/1 The modern English Language is founded on the Anglo-Normannic, of which the two earliest specimens referred to by Hickes are the Life of St. Margaret and the Description of Cokaygne.

1861 Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 8 361 The first step in the modern English assibilation of t and d.

1952 Eng. & Gmc. Stud. IV. 12 We may regard Modern English stone as the result of operating with an operator that I shall write {AS. ā > MnE. [ou]} on Anglo-Saxon stān.

1991 IRAL 29 118 Mathesius (1928) has argued that the Modern English passive developed historically to counter the inflexibility of the English system in which subject and topic usually come first.