Abstract
Over the past 50 years, plain language has been an important topic in the English-speaking countries, influencing the way legal documents are drafted. Recent efforts have concentrated primarily on legislation, imposing plain language standards through legislative drafting guidelines and banning certain words.
This contribution aims to show how this trend has developed over time, measuring the use of certain archaic expressions (e.g., hereinafter, aforesaid) in British legislation over the past 200 years. For this purpose, 4 corpora have been compiled in order to establish to what extent the archaic expressions have been disappearing from statutes.
Furthermore, lexical richness in those corpora will be examined to determine whether plain language tends to deprive legal language of its diversity. Legal English teachers can use this research to illustrate how plain language has worked its way into legislation and to potentially engage in a debate on the future developments.