- 1100–1600 AD: Middle English
From the Norman conquest of England in 1066, English starts to adopt French words, especially business and political terms and those related to power. Middle English emerged from this process.
The difference between beef, the veal eaten by Norman aristocrats and cow, the animal kept by English peasants stems from this period.
- 1600 AD–today: Modern English
The first English-language dictionary was published in 1604.
With the rise of technological advances, new words needed to be coined to describe new things. For this, English looked to Latin and Greek. It's not that terms like oxygen and protein already existed in classical languages but they provided the roots to form the new terms.
Cyberspace and microchip are good examples of very recent neologisms which have been formed in the same way