Scribble the Answers to This History of Writing Quiz

Most famous for writing “Paradise Lost,” John Milton is credited with adding 630 words to the English language, including such gems as “complacency,” “debauchery,” and “dismissive.” William Shakespeare comes in second place, originating just under 500 English words.

If you look at the keyboard on your smartphone or computer, the keys appear to be randomly placed. But this QWERTY design was actually the invention of Christopher Latham Sholes, back in 1874. He devised the layout so that common letter pairings (like “st” for example) were spaced apart and didn’t cause the metal arms of his typewriter to jam.

The creation of paper is thanks in part to a first-century scholar living in Han Dynasty China. On March 11, 105 CE, court official Cai Lun presented a new papermaking process to Chinese Emperor He of Han. Today, Lun’s process is considered one of ancient China’s “Four Great Inventions,” along with printmaking, gunpowder, and the compass.

Medieval manuscripts were both written and illuminated (aka decorated or illustrated) by monks in what’s known as a scriptorium, Latin for “place of writing”. This method of bookmaking lasted roughly a thousand years, from 500 CE to 1500 CE, until the arrival of the printing press made these religious scribes obsolete.

Before the arrival of paper, most important documents were recorded on parchment, which was traditionally made from the skin of calves, goats, or sheep. In fact, the founding documents of the United States, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, were all originally composed on parchment (likely sheepskin).

Take a look at the original Bill of Rights and you’ll see a spelling oddity right at the top of the page, as it seems to read “Congrefs of the United States.” That’s because for centuries, English employed what’s known as a “long S” whenever the lowercase letter occurred at the beginning or in the middle of a word. Although it looks like an “F,” it still makes an “S” sound.

The first book printed in English wasn’t the Bible or even a printing press how-to manual — it was a translation of a French courtly romance titled “The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.” The book is a collection of tales pertaining to the Trojan Wars and was likely printed in Bruges or Ghent in Belgium in 1473.

In 1066 When William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and became the first Norman king of the British Isles, he set in motion an epic clash of languages. French, a Romance language, and English, a Germanic language, mingled together for centuries. Today, nearly 45% of English words have French origins, though many of the most common words have Germanic roots.

Why do old-timey shops sometimes have names beginning with “Ye Olde”? The answer is the Middle English letter thorn. Resembling a hybrid of a P and a B, the thorn makes a “th” sound, which means “Ye Olde Gift Shop” should actually be pronounced “The Old Gift Shop.” Though the sound has endured, the letter Y and thorn looked similar in certain Gothic scripts, so thorn eventually fell out of use.

In 1843, researchers Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail received a grant to test out a new form of communication. Using an electrical telegraph, they transmitted coded messages made up of dashes and dots — a method later dubbed "Morse code." One researcher traveled to Washington, D.C. and the other Baltimore, Maryland. Morse sent the first message to Vail on May 24, 1844: "What hath god wrought!"

Cuneiform originated in Mesopotamia, where it was carved into stone tablets with a reed stylus. This writing system wasn’t a language in itself, but was used to depict multiple languages, such as Sumerian and Akkadian. Named for its wedge-shaped marks, it inspired many other writing systems. Cuneiform survived for over 3,000 years, outliving some of the languages it represented, including Sumerian.

The Rosetta Stone was merely a copy of a political decree carved in Egypt in 200 BCE. But when Napoleon’s soldiers found the stone slab in 1799, scholars had lost the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone was a crucial discovery because the text appeared in three languages: Hieroglyphs, Demotic (the native Egyptian script), and ancient Greek.

In the early 19th century, the ampersand (&) was the 27th item in the English alphabet. The word came from a medieval tradition that used the Latin phrase “per se,” meaning “by itself,” to refer to letters and symbols that were also words (think “I” as both a letter and a word meaning “me”). The phrase “and per se and” ended the alphabet, and in time blended together to become “ampersand.”

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention made the Renaissance and subsequent Scientific Revolution in Europe possible. Before the printing press, books were painstakingly transcribed by hand. The machine allowed copies of texts to be disseminated far and wide, which helped to democratize knowledge and improve education and literacy around the world.

Noah Webster’s Dictionary of American English, first published in April 1828, is the single most important book for defining the American dialect of English. In his dictionary, Webster established many of the spelling differences between American and British English that still exist today, such as “color” vs. “colour,” “realize” vs. “realise,” and so on.