Modern English
Modern English (sometimes New English or NE as opposed to Middle English and Old English) is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in the late 14th century and was completed in roughly 1550.
Vernacular
Bilingual dictionaries and glossaries precede modern English and were in use in the earliest written English. The first monolingual dictionary was Robert Cawdrey's "Table Alphabeticall" (1604) which was followed by Edward Phillips's "A New World of English Words" (1658) and Nathaniel Bailey's "An Universal Etymological English Dictionary" (1721). These dictionaries whetted the interest of the English-speaking public in greater and more prescriptive dictionaries until Samuel Johnson published "Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language" (1747), which would imitate the dictionary being produced by the French Academy. He had no problem acquiring the funding, but not as a prescriptive dictionary. This was to be a grand comprehensive dictionary of all English words at any period, "A Dictionary of the English Language" (1755).