How did the Germanic dialect of a small island become a lingua franca spoken by two billion people across the globe? This compelling guide charts the history of the English language from the earliest texts to the age of Twitter. Attractively illustrated with colour photographs and maps, the book focuses on 100 places that played a key role in the development of the language, from Canterbury – where the Latin alphabet was adopted – to Kolkata, and from Salford to San Francisco.

For this short dictionary, Tuleja has selected foreign tems that are neither completely Anglicized nor merely pedantic. From Abendland (German: 'the West') to zolotaya seredina (Russian: 'the golden middle'), he a gives a translation, pronunciation and information on meaning and history; and there is much more - among the 'Special Categories' are classical phobias, a Sanskrit sampler, Italian musical terms and fearless leaders (caliph, czar, kaiser etc). Finally, there are indexes of words and phrases and subjects.

This collection of unusual puzzles challenges the reader not only to find solutions but, in the spirit of computing pioneer Alan Turing’s methodology, to tease out the rules of the puzzles themselves. The puzzles, which mainly involve words and letters, increase in difficulty as the book progresses, but cryptic titles and numerous optional hints (listed in a separate section) lead codebreakers step by step to solutions catalogued at the back.