The Adventure of English

The Adventure of English is a British television series on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, also written by Bragg. The series ran in 2003. The series and the book are cast as an adventure story, or the biography of English as if it were a living being, covering the history of the language from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language. In the television series, Bragg explains the origins and spelling of many words based on the times in which they were introduced into the growing language that would eventually become modern English.