In 1646, the English physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne introduced the English word "electricity" in the second edition of his encyclopedic work "Pseudodoxia Epidemica" published in Norwich. Browne adapted Gilbert's Latin "electricus" into English, giving the phenomenon its lasting English name. The book was widely read and reprinted throughout the seventeenth century, helping to popularize the concept among educated readers across England and beyond.

Sir Thomas Browne is himself one of the most important prose stylists in English literature, deeply admired by Samuel Johnson, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. His coinage of "electricity" in a literary work rather than a purely scientific one established the term's dual identity as both a scientific and poetic word. This blending of scientific and literary language in Browne's work prefigured the Romantic ideal of the poet-scientist and gave subsequent writers a word carrying both precision and mystery.