‘Tis commonly proclaimed that Shakespeare invented about 1,500 English words. Michael LoMonico’s The Shakespeare Book of Lists
enumerates some of the most contemporarily prominent of these words, including
- advertising
- bandit
- critic
- hush
- investment
- kissing
- numb
- shooting star
- undress
- yelping
- zany
(Find more here.) Some of these words are difficult to accept as possibly coined by Will Shakespeare. While words like “zany” or expressions like “shooting star” seem quite inventable, words that are simple, grammatical variants of preexisting words like “kissing” and “undress” (from bases “to kiss” and “to dress,” respectively) seem more like they must have been circulating orally before Will wrote them down. Thus, if you were to revise common wisdom to be more accurate, you’d say that Shakespeare’s works contain the oldest written instances of about 1,500 English words… the difference being that the latter allows for the likely possibility that Will didn’t invent a good number of those words but rather borrowed them from Elizabethan England’s spoken vernacular. If you had been the first person to use the word metrosexual in a novel, 500 years from now it might have looked like you invented it—when, in fact, you heard it from your college friends while discussing why your male roommate owns 24 pairs of shoes.
Yet what’s the likelihood that Will Shakespeare happened to be the first person to write down so many common English words? Weren’t people writing in English for a long time before that? Aside from the obvious possibility that prior usages have simply been lost to the ravages of time, The ‘Pedia notes that prior to the sixteenth century “legal matters in England were conducted in French, Latin had been used to write history, philosophy, and theology, and for the most part [English] writers did not write in their native tongue [of English].” Apparently, Latin, not English, had been the language of choice for writers and poets until Shakespeare’s time, so it’s really not that surprising that he might’ve been the first person to pen them.
And yet… perhaps it’s not so unlikely after all that Shakespeare might truly have invented a good number of the 1,500 terms accredited to his imagination. From the same Wikipedia article linked to above, we learn:
From nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin and Greek and other modern Romance languages, it is estimated that between the years of 1500 and 1659 30,000 new words were added to the English language.
Wow, that’s 189 words a year or one new word every two days! So perhaps Shakespeare could’ve been making up all those words; everybody seemed to be doing it.
Such a rapid pace of linguistic creation seems strange for a time like the sixteenth century, when travel was arduous and communities were much smaller. Things tended change at a slower pace. But something special had appeared in the 1430’s that changed the pace of the spread of information in Europe: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. Suddenly more people could afford books, more people could read, and more text started being written in English. With so much new material and worldly attention giving it bigger shoes to fill, the English language was forced to grow. The language lacked a decent vocabulary and simply needed more words. From this perspective, it becomes more believable that Will could’ve invented a fair number of the words attributed to him… especially words like “puke” (which Shakespeare may have borrowed from German).
And let me tell you, 189 new English terms a year is nothing compared to the number of words invented annually in the face of the most modern technological marvel: the World Wide Web, which has had the effect of Gutenberg’s printing press times a thousand in terms of making information more widely available and connecting people. Think about how often you see unfamiliar terms in the vernaculars of techies, gamers, marketers, bloggers, and every other community nowadays. For instance, read the example for usage of the word “wi-five,” a gamer term, as defined by The Urban Dictionary:
wi-five December 11
It’s a high five that doesn’t involve actually contact, normally over a long distance where a real high-five isn’t possible. Mix of “wireless” and “high-five”, hence “wi-five” (wireless high-five).
Iain (yelling across the room): Dude, that mess was teh pwnz. Wi-five, brosef
Eric (in response): You need to chill with that
nano shit, son
Forget the word “wi-five;” would you be as clueless as me if someone said to you, “You need to chill with that nano shit?” New English is constantly being forged by everyday authors, thinkers, and casual users of the Internet. And it’s being recognized by very legitimate authorities of language: Merriam-Webster just announced that its 2007 Word of the Year is “w00t.” Just check out some of these great sites that are entirely devoted to rooting out and defining new words on the fringes of English:
Each one of these posts multiple entries per day and still can’t keep up with the actual pace of linguistic creation. (Try subscribing to some of these by RSS or email… they’re fun!) My point is, if we invent dozens of words a day in the face of the technological and cultural revolution that is the Internet, then it’s not so hard to imagine that Will might have been inventing words like crazy in the face of the English language’s growth-spurt, spawned by a different but no less significant technological achievement.
Whether he really made them or not, Will Shakespeare gets popular credit for those 1,500 words. While you’ll probably never rack up so many yourself, if you stay on the cutting-edge of the English language you may, one day, get your own citation in the Double-Tongued Dictionary and live on forever in our lexicon… just like The Bard himself. Only slightly less famous.
Art contribution by MuLaN™.
, and that’s always rewarding for language-lovers. But what if you don’t want to sit down with a workbook or a self-help course?
View Evan Quinlan’s profile
Recent Comments