The word’s the thing: Shakespearean trends

In all of his work, Shakespeare uses 17,677 unique words. Did he invent them?

By: Raechelle Wilson

It’s perfectly obvious that you’re quoting Shakespeare when you say “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” But how about when you tell someone that they “wear their heart on their sleeve,” or that they’ve got “too much of a good thing”?

In all of his work, Shakespeare uses 17,677 unique words. Of those, 1700 had never been recorded before. Did he invent them? Is Shakespeare the greatest English trendsetter of all time? Well, yes and no. There wasn’t exactly an English dictionary from his time that tells us what words were being spoken, and Latin was still the preferred language for formal writing. The truth is that English was going through a great period of expansion in the Elizabethan era. And, frankly, people were inventing new words all the time. Shakespeare wasn’t the only one doing this, but since his works have survived and been so celebrated (the original scholars behind the Oxford English Dictionary read his work meticulously), the Bard’s words have had a profound effect on modern English.

Phrases like “love is blind,” “catch a cold,” “mind’s eye” and “heart of gold” are common to native and non-native English speakers alike. However, it’s Shakespeare’s words alone that might prove to be the most pervasive, and most surprising, of his contributions to the language.

The next time you use any of these, you can thank Shakespeare:

Accommodation, amazement, apostrophe, assassination, bloody, bump, control (as a noun), countless, courtship, critic/critical, dislocate, dwindle, eventful, exposure, fitful, generous, gloomy, housekeeping, hurry, impartial, indistinguishable, laughable, lonely, majestic, misplaced, monumental, obscene, pious, premeditated, radiance, road, sanctimonious, submerge, suspicious… and so many more.

Of course, not everything stuck. You’re not likely to hear attasked, crants, dispunge, enactures, immoment, indigest, mirable, mistempered, palmy, plantage, rigol, smilets or virgined any time soon.

Still, proving that he was ahead of his time, and FaceBook, Shakespeare did coin the verb “to friend” … and its subsequent conjugation “friended.”