Confronted with a tide like Thomas Hardy’s English the reviewer is likely to exclaim waspishly ‘I know that!’, but any tendency towards frivolity disappears once one begins to read this book. This is an extraordinarily thorough, exhaustive and illuminating study of the amazingly varied resources Hardy drew on for his language. The book is part of a series known as The Language Library and it is the specifics of Hardy’ s actual use of words that Professor Elliott, now Emeritus Professor and Master of University house at the Australian National University, is concerned with.