The Oxford History of English is an updated version of a work whose first edition appeared in 2006. The content is essentially the same as that of the first edition, with the same fourteen chapters covering a chronology stretching from prehistory (‘Before English’, pp. 9–38) to the present (‘Into the Twenty-first Century’, pp. 488–513). Apart from the addition of some post-2006 publications to the references and suggestions for further reading that accompany the chapters, this updating is most obvious in the last chapter, where David Crystal considers, alongside globalization and changes in educational policy, the influence of electronic communication. The latter, in particular, is an area of rapid change: the appended timeline (pp. 514–29) informs us that Twitter was launched in the same year as the first edition of The Oxford History of English was published, and by the time this second edition appeared it had reached 10 million users in the UK.