[originaltext] English is a little like a living thing that continues to gr

English is a little like a living thing that continues to grow. English began to grow more quickly when William Caxton returned to Britain in the year 1476. He had been in Holland and other areas of Europe where he had learned printing. (26) He returned to Britain with the first printing press. The printing press made it possible for almost anyone to buy a book, which helped spread education and the English language. Slowly. (27) during the fifteen hundreds English became the modern language we would understand. English speakers today would be able to communicate with English speakers in the last part of the 16th Century. It was during this period that the greatest writer in English, William Shakespeare produced his works. (28) The development of the English language took a giant step just nine years before the death of William Shakespeare. Three small British ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1607 and landed in an area that would become the southern American state of Virginia.  They began the first of several British colonies, tn time, people in these new colonies began to call areas of their new land by words borrowed from the native people they found living there. For example, (29) many of the great rivers in the United States are taken from American Indian words. The Mississippi, the Missouri are examples. This borrowing or adding of foreign words to English was a way of expanding the language. The names of three days of the week, that is, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are good examples of this.