Pride and Prejudice is over two hundred years old and so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that it uses quite a few (85 by my criteria) “old fashioned” words that rarely appear in modern english but were quite common in other books written in the early 1800s. Highlights include:
- affections
- candid
- expedient
- occasioned
- procured
- talents
I find myself vaguely wondering when we shifted away from talking about “talents” and towards using “skills”. If I’m reading the Google word counts correctly modern English uses “skills” almost ten times more often than ‘talents” while 1800s English almost never used “skills” at all.
Now on to the words that Jane Austin used with notable frequency even when compared to other authors from her era.
As you would expect there were a significant number of romantic words:
- affectionate
- amiable
- blush
- fond
- happiness
- longed
- marriage
Of course, a good book must have conflict and so aside from the languages of love there are quite a lot of words of hate and sorrow, including “hate” itself which is not an unusual word in and of itself but is notable when it shows up with extreme frequency:
- abhorrence
- affront
- bitterness
- deceived
- despising
- distressed
- grieved
- hate
- insolent
- painful
- uneasiness
The fact that this is a primarily a book about the social maneuverings of the upper and trying-to-be upper class is also evident by the abundance of words such as:
- acquaintance
- compliment
- cordiality
- dance
- dinner
- etiquette
- family
- gentlemen
- housekeeper
- library
- manners
- neighbourhood
- parlour
The world “parlour” on its own is enough to conjure up images of men in suits politely courting women in frilly dresses while maids bustle about with tea and cake.
As a final interesting note the book used the word “pride” with unusual frequency but only included a normal amount of “prejudice”.
