The Shakespeare Book of Lists

You may have seen my other Shakespeare BYKI lists covering Falstaff’s vocabulary. What is BYKI? BYKI is an online tool you can use to learn pretty much anything, even though the company that develops the software, Transparent Language, is focused on using it to teach foreign languages. I think that BYKI is perfectly suited for learning Shakespearean vocabulary, so I make wordlists on occasion and offer them on this site. To use the widget, simply click “Start Learning” and choose a mode (try Recognize It to start).

Why use my BYKI widgets? Because if you know Shakespearean vocabulary before you read the plays, you’ll know the meanings of difficult words as you encounter them, which will allow you to enjoy the flow of the story uninterrupted. This will increase your enjoyment of the plays dramatically (no pun intended). It’s critical to know the meanings of words like

• Dispatch
• Office
• Troth
• Verily

or you’ll miss out on some great literature.

The list below covers all of Will’s plays, and while many of the definitions given are for specific instances of the word (for instance, “power” will not always mean “army,” but it does in Antony and Cleopatra, Act III Scene 7) it will still be useful to know how the words can be used in different contexts. If you ever want to find occurrences of a given word in Shakespeare’s plays, I suggest you try the advanced search feature at Open Source Shakespeare. It’s very thorough.

Without further ado, here’s the list…

NOTE: Some words may look like they’re supposed to be verbs, like “mew,” which means “confine,” but if I didn’t write “to” in front of the word then it’s not intended to be a verb. A mew is actually a thing: a confine or a cage.

The $250,000 question asks how many unique words Shakespeare used in his complete works. The answer is about 30,000. The average high school student, it turns out, uses about 10,000.

Lots of readily available written sources use a vocabulary that extends beyond a layman’s knowledge. There are lots of ways to improve your personal lexicon if you work at it a little, 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?

The best option is probably to read. Yet, I find that when reading I’ll just infer the meaning of a word from its surrounding context or skip over it and move on. The meaning will become clear enough as I go. So I don’t really have to learn the words.

What’s great about Shakespeare is, it’s theater–it’s meant to be spoken aloud. If you read some passages aloud to yourself, you’ll realize quickly that you sound silly and awkward when you don’t know what a word means. You can’t create the proper inflection; the sentence doesn’t make sense without the meaning behind it, especially to the modern ear. So you go look up the word… and it’s so satisfying.

Try reading just one full play aloud to yourself, and really look up the words. I guarantee it’ll add several hundred good words to your vocabulary AND heighten your appreciation for the story you just read.

(I fell in love with Shakespeare after I read Twelfth Night aloud with my little brother and the girl I was dating. It changed the way I heard words forever.)

Pay special attention to scene I.2, where Falstaff drops the line, “Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.” (I.2.60-61) Henry V fans will be able to spot the situational irony (remember English class?) revealed in this future scene.

¹archaic: old ²colloquialism: term used in informal conversation ³vernacular: plain talk of common people