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Beauty is a feast for the eyes of every.

I'd thought it was Old English. But, someone said it's downright ungrammatical and isn't Old English.

Beauty is a feast for the eyes of every person / everyone.

I wanted to sound like Shakespeare and because it's a riddle, mysterious words help.

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  • Some of your questions have been hard to classify. Here, for the purposes of ELL, there's a quick answer to the question in the title, "Is it grammatical?" -- "It isn't and here's why..." Now, the question "Was it said in Shakespeare's time?" that I read in the body of the text requires a different response and that's what I tried to compose. But it isn't a learning question so much as a history question. You could try it at ELU, but then they might send you back here because it looks like a grammatical error. So if you decide clearly on what to ask, it will be easier to find it a home.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 6:58
  • Incidentally, though I think this is not the forum for puzzle critique, here's a thought on the linguistic aspect: It's very hard to be effectively "mysterious" in a language you don't claim to have mastered. Bending the rules is a tricky business if you wish to produce that effect instead of confusion or nonsense. It was disconcerted to discover this when translating English poetry with unique syntax into French years ago: I failed to make authentic, "natively unusual" choices. As in music, there are right ways to be wrong! I don't mean don't experiment, but don't rely yet on experimentation.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 7:09
  • You could use every as a noun in Middle English, hundreds of years before Shakespeare. You could probably get away with in the eye(s) of each and every.
    – TimR
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 11:45
  • Agreed: the fixed expression "each and every" will be recognized by the modern speaker as valid. (I'm not sure it will conjure up Shakespeare, but it does sound old-fashioned, at least!)
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 12:07
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    Just a bit of orientation for the OP: The 'Old English' period stretched from about the 7th c. to the 12th c.; the 'Middle English' period from the 12th to the 14th; and Shakespeare's English was 16th-17th c.
    – TimR
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 12:40

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was possible in Middle English (1150~1500).

every, adj. and pron.
II. pron
†6. Everybody, every one. Obs.

c1386 Chaucer .. Every hath of God a propre gifte, som this, som that, as him likith.
(Everyone has his own gift from God — one this, another that, as befits him.)

There are a few more definitions very similar to that one, most of them † obsolete.

However, it does mention this entry that is "obsolete except in legal documents". Note that it doesn't quite correspond to your example because it must be followed by "of":

7 a. Each, or every one, of (several persons or things).

1665 Defoe .. Every of the said Chirurgeons shall have Twelvepence a Body searched by them.
(Each of the aforementioned surgeons shall receive 12 pence for each body they look at.)

Both of the above uses of every are very foreign to my own ears, and I say that despite having just waded through about a thousand pages of John Milton (1608–74). Obviously, if there are examples there are examples, but what I mean is that it may not ring true to a modern hearer, the way some things make us say, "That sounds like Shakespeare!"

One thing worth noting is that several other words of this type have, on the other hand, retained their pronominal uses, among them some, none, both, all, neither, either, and one that corresponds closely to every, namely each. Some are more poetic than others, but all are easily understood.

Here's the OED reference for one of them:

each, adj. and pron.
II. As pronoun.
3. With reference to a n. going before, or followed by of. [...]

1837 J. H. Newman .. Each has his own place marked out for him.

This is interesting since every is the remnant of an Old English compound ǽfre ǽlc corresponding to "ever each" (which the OED's version of the etymology claims were two synonyms reinforcing each other). The OED examples show the phonology of the second word gradually eroding. We might say that the pronominal sense of each disappeared from every as surely as the signs of its ever having been there.

The OED tells me that every is also a separate noun that once (19th century) meant "rye grass". This is quite a hard bit of trivia to Google given the functional status of "every" today. That might make it a good candidate to include in a riddle. :)

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  • quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/… See #5 for noun uses in Middle English. E.g. She was so diligent..To serue and plese euerich in that place.
    – TimR
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 11:41
  • @T Thanks. One of the downsides of the OED, despite the level of detail it affords, is the inability to publicly link to entries. There are several good examples there, too, but they can hardly all be quoted, so that ME dictionary is nice. Assuming the words can be recognized through those delightful spellings :D
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Jul 17, 2017 at 12:14
  • There's a Project Gutenberg ME Dict that might be a little easier to navigate than the phrase-based thinger at UMich. The Michigan one is better for finding collocations etc. Also, there's a copy of the 1884 Stratman here at archive.org.
    – P. E. Dant Reinstate Monica
    Commented Jul 18, 2017 at 1:27

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