Somewhere in a pub quiz tonight, the claim will surface: Shakespeare invented 1,700 English words. Sometimes the figure is 2,000, occasionally 3,000, and the list of examples is always seductive — eyeball, bedazzled, swagger, lonely, assassination, gloomy. It is among the most repeated statistics about the English language, and it rests on a misunderstanding so instructive that unpicking it teaches you more about dictionaries than about the Bard. The words are real, the plays are real, and Shakespeare's fingerprints are genuinely all over modern English. But "first recorded use" — which is what the famous number actually counts — is not remotely the same thing as invention.
The figure descends from the Oxford English Dictionary, the great Victorian project to trace every English word back to its earliest appearance in print. The OED was built by volunteer readers posting in quotation slips, and no author was combed more exhaustively than Shakespeare: he supplies roughly 33,000 quotations, more than any other single writer, and somewhere in the region of 1,700 entries list him as the earliest evidence found. But an earliest citation records only that nobody had spotted an older example. Victorian volunteers read every line of the First Folio; they did not read every sermon, ballad, medical manual and ship's log of the 1580s. Shakespeare won many of those races partly by default.
Digitisation has been quietly settling the score. Once vast archives of early printed books became searchable, scholars began antedating supposed Shakespearean coinages by the dozen, turning them up in pamphlets and treatises by writers nobody has read for centuries. Plenty of famous credits still stand in some form — "assassination" makes its first recorded appearance in Macbeth, and "swagger" swaggers into print in A Midsummer Night's Dream — but each new database sweep trims the total. The lesson is not that Shakespeare borrowed; it is that a dictionary can only cite what its readers happen to have read.
Context matters too. Shakespeare wrote in the middle of a lexical gold rush: between roughly 1500 and 1650, English absorbed new vocabulary at a pace never matched before or since, hoovering up Latin, French and Italian terms as the language of a small island went suddenly literary. The borrowing grew so feverish that purists sneered at pretentious "inkhorn terms" and demanded plain Saxon speech. Every ambitious writer of the age was coining, adapting and showing off; Shakespeare simply did it on the biggest stage, in scripts that actors memorised and audiences repeated. He was the finest surfer on the wave — but the wave was not his.
What Shakespeare actually did
His genuine talent was less conjuring than converting. He turned nouns into verbs with cheerful violence — characters in the plays "dog" one another's footsteps and "elbow" through crowds, and Richard II protests "grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle". He bolted words together into compounds such as "cold-blooded", and reached endlessly for the prefix un-, giving us the likes of "uncomfortable" and Lady Macbeth's chilling "unsex me here". The linguist David Crystal, who has studied the question as closely as anyone, reckons that of the words first recorded in Shakespeare perhaps only around half were truly his own inventions — still a remarkable haul, just not the mythical one.
Nor did every experiment take. Othello's "exsufflicate" and Twelfth Night's "impeticos" were minted, used once and never picked up again; the plays are littered with such nonce words that history politely declined. A related myth inflates his vocabulary: the complete works contain roughly 20,000 distinct words, yet one still meets confident claims that he "knew" 60,000 or more — a figure produced by statistical extrapolation, not evidence. What is true is that the words which did survive survived spectacularly, because for four centuries his plays have never stopped being read, performed and quoted.
The phrase-maker
If anything, his phrases outperform his words. Romeo and Juliet gives English the "wild-goose chase"; Othello, the "green-eyed monster"; Antony and Cleopatra, our "salad days"; Macbeth, the "be-all and the end-all"; Henry V, a "heart of gold". Quiz setters should tread carefully even here — several such expressions had earlier or more literal senses that Shakespeare sharpened rather than created — but as a single source of everyday idiom he has no rival in the language.
The honest verdict, then: a dictionary's first citation is a statement about surviving evidence, not a birth certificate. New words are almost always coined in crowds — in markets, taverns, playhouses and print shops — and Shakespeare was the crowd's most quotable member, the writer whose usage got remembered while everyone else's crumbled into unread paper. He may never have minted 1,700 words. He was something rarer: the mint through which the language passed and came out gleaming.
Quiz nuggets
- Shakespeare supplies roughly 33,000 quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary — more than any other single author.
- "Assassination" makes its first recorded appearance in Macbeth, and "swagger" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Romeo and Juliet gave English the "wild-goose chase", Othello the "green-eyed monster" and Antony and Cleopatra our "salad days".
- Linguist David Crystal estimates only around half of the words first recorded in Shakespeare were genuine coinages.
- His complete works contain roughly 20,000 distinct words; claims of a 60,000-word vocabulary are statistical extrapolation.