The word ‘the’ is the sole definite article in the English language. It's also the most common word in our language. However, for such a grammatically fundamental word, its history isn't as straightforward as one might think. Old English had a whopping twenty different forms of the definite article, all of which collapsed into the single, versatile word ‘the’ by the time of Modern English. We discuss some of these older forms and their evolutions.

In this conversation, Steve and I discuss the linguistic influence of the King James Bible and some common English idioms that have Biblical etymologies.