Inkhorn debate

An inkhorn term is any foreign borrowing (or a word created from existing word roots by an English speaker) into English deemed to be unnecessary or overly pretentious.

An inkhorn is an inkwell made out of horn. It was an important item for many scholars and soon became symbolic of writers in general. Later it became a byword for fussy or pedantic writers.

And ere that we will suffer such a prince,
So kind a father of the commonweal,
To be disgracèd by an inkhorn mate

Controversy over inkhorn terms was rife from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century, during the transition from Middle English to Modern English. It was also a time when English was in contest with Latin as the main language of science and learning in England, having already displaced French. Many new words were being introduced into the language by writers, often self-consciously borrowing from Classical literature. Critics regarded these words as useless, usually requiring knowledge of Latin or Greek to be understood. They also contended that there were words with identical meaning already in English. Some of the terms did indeed seem to fill a semantic gap in English (often technical and scientific words) whereas others coexisted with native (Germanic) words with the same or similar meanings and often supplanted them. The phrase "inkhorn term" appeared as early as 1553.

Writers such as Thomas Elyot and George Pettie were enthusiastic borrowers of new words whereas Thomas Wilson and John Cheke argued against them. Cheke wrote:

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