The 420 Words That Shakespeare Invented

Inventors get a lot of love. Thomas Edison is held up as a tinkering genius. Steve Jobs is considered a saint in Silicon Valley. Hedy Lamar, meanwhile, may have been a Hollywood star but a new book makes clear her real legacy is in inventing the foundations of encryption. But while all these people invented things, it’s possible to invent something even more fundamental. Take Shakespeare: he invented words. And he invented more words—words that continue to shape the English language—than anyone else. By a long shot.

But what does it mean to “invent” words? How many words did Shakespeare invent? What kind of words? And which words are those exactly? Rather than just listing all the words Shakespeare invented, this post digs deeper into the how and the why (or “wherefore”) of Shakespeare’s literary creations.

How Many Words Did Shakespeare Invent?

1700! My, what a perfectly round number! Such a large and perfectly round number is misleading at best, and is more likely just wrong—there is in fact a bunch of debate about the accuracy of this number.

So who’s to blame for the uncertainty around the number of words Shakespeare invented? For starters, we can blame the Oxford English Dictionary. This famous dictionary (often called the OED for short) is famous, in part, because it provides incredibly thorough definitions of words, but also because it identifies the first time each word actually appeared in written English. Shakespeare appears as the first documented user of more words than any other writer, making it convenient to assume that he was the creator of all of those words.

In reality, though, many of these words were probably part of everyday discourse in Elizabethan England. So it’s highly likely that Shakespeare didn’t invent all of these words; he just produced the first preserved record of some of them. Ryan Buda, a writer at Letterpile, explains it like this:

But most likely, the word was in use for some time before it is seen in the writings of Shakespeare. The fact that the word first appears there does not necessarily mean that he made it up himself, but rather, he could have borrowed it from his peers or from conversations he had with others.

However, while Shakespeare might have been just the first person to write down some words, he definitely did create many words himself, plenty of which we still use to this day. The list a ways down below contains the 420 words that almost certainly originated from Shakespeare himself.

But all this leads to another question. What does it even mean to “invent” a word?

How Did Shakespeare Invent Words?

Some writers invent words in the same way Thomas Edison invented light bulbs: they cobble together bits of sound and create entirely new words without any meaning or relation to existing words. Lewis Carroll does in the first stanza of his “Jabberwocky” poem:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Carroll totally made up words like “brillig,” “slithy,” “toves,” and “mimsy”; the first stanza alone contains 11 of these made-up words, which are known as nonce words. Words like these aren’t just meaningless, they’re also disposable, intended to be used just once.

Shakespeare did not create nonce words. He took an entirely different approach. When he invented words, he did it by working with existing words and altering them in new ways. More specifically, he would create new words by:

Conjoining two words
Changing verbs into adjectives
Changing nouns into verbs
Adding prefixes to words
Adding suffixes to words

The most exhaustive take on Shakespeare’s invented words comes from a nice little 874-page book entitled The Shakespeare Key by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. Here’s how they explain Shakespeare’s literary innovations:

Shakespeare, with the right and might of a true poet, and with his peculiar royal privilege as king of all poets, has minted several words that deserve to become current in our language. He coined them for his own special use to express his own special meanings in his own special passages; but they are so expressive and so well framed to be exponents of certain particulars in meanings common to us all, that they deserve to become generally adopted and used.

We can call what Shakespeare did to create new words “minting,” “coining” or “inventing.” Whatever term we use to describe it, Shakespeare was doing things with words that no one had ever thought to do before, and that’s what matters.

Shakespeare Didn’t Invent Nonsense Words

Though today readers often need the help of modern English translations to fully grasp the nuance and meaning of Shakespeare’s language, Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would have had a much easier go of it. Why? Two main reasons.

First, Shakespeare was part of a movement in English literature that introduced more prose into plays. (Earlier plays were written primarily in rhyming verse.) Shakespeare’s prose was similar to the style and cadence of everyday conversation in Elizabethan England, making it natural for members of his audience to understand.

In addition, the words he created were comprehensible intuitively because, once again, they were often built on the foundations of already existing words, and were not just unintelligible combinations of sound. Take “congreeted” for example. The prefix “con” means with, and “greet” means to receive or acknowledge someone.

It therefore wasn’t a huge stretch for people to understand this line:

That, face to face and royal eye to eye.
You have congreeted.

(Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2)

Shakespeare also made nouns into verbs. He was the first person to use friend as a verb, predating Mark Zuckerberg by about 395 years.

And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you

(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

Other times, despite his proclivity for making compound words, Shakespeare reached into his vast Latin vocabulary for loanwords.

His heart fracted and corroborate.

(Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1)

Here the Latin word fractus means “broken.” Take away the –us and add in the English suffix –ed, and a new English word is born.

New Words Are Nothing New

Shakespeare certainly wasn’t the first person to make up words. It’s actually entirely commonplace for new words to enter a language. We’re adding new words and terms to our “official” dictionaries every year. In the past few years, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has added several new words and phrases, like these:

bokeh
elderflower
fast fashion
first world problem
ginger
microaggression
mumblecore
pareidolia
ping
safe space
wayback
wayback machine
woo-woo

So inventing words wasn’t something unique to Shakespeare or Elizabethan England. It’s still going on all the time.

But Shakespeare Invented a Lot of New Words

So why did Shakespeare have to make up hundreds of new words? For starters, English was smaller in Shakespeare’s time. The language contained many fewer words, and not enough for a literary genius like Shakespeare. How many words? No one can be sure. One estimates, one from Encyclopedia Americana, puts the number at 50,000-60,000, likely not including medical and scientific terms.

During Shakespeare’s time, the number of words in the language began to grow. Edmund Weiner, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains it this way:

The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for this purpose. Others advocated the revival of obsolete words and the adoption of regional dialect.

In Shakespeare’s collected writings, he used a total of 31,534 different words. Whatever the size of the English lexicon at the time, Shakespeare was in command of a substantial portion of it. Jason Kottke estimates that Shakespeare knew around 66,534 words, which suggests Shakespeare was pushing the boundaries of English vocab as he knew it. He had to make up some new words.

The Complete List of Words Shakespeare Invented

Compiling a definitive list of every word that Shakespeare ever invented is impossible. But creating a list of the words that Shakespeare almost certainly invented can be done. We generated list of words below by starting with the words that Shakespeare was the first to use in written language, and then applying research that has identified which words were probably in everyday use during Shakespeare’s time. The result are 420 bona fide words minted, coined, and invented by Shakespeare, from “academe” to “zany”:

academe
accessible
accommodation
addiction
admirable
aerial
airless
amazement
anchovy
arch-villain
auspicious
bacheolorship
barefaced
baseless
batty
beachy
bedroom
belongings
birthplace
black-faced
bloodstained
bloodsucking
blusterer
bodikins
braggartism
brisky
broomstaff
budger
bump
buzzer
candle holder
catlike
characterless
cheap
chimney-top
chopped
churchlike
circumstantial
clangor
cold-blooded
coldhearted
compact
consanguineous
control
coppernose
countless
courtship
critical
cruelhearted
Dalmatian
dauntless
dawn
day’s work
deaths-head
defeat
depositary
dewdrop
dexterously
disgraceful
distasteful
distrustful
dog-weary
doit (a Dutch coin: ‘a pittance’)
domineering
downstairs
dwindle
East Indies
embrace
employer
employment
enfranchisement
engagement
enrapt
epileptic
equivocal
eventful
excitement
expedience
expertness
exposure
eyedrop
eyewink
fair-faced
fairyland
fanged
fap
far-off
farmhouse
fashionable
fashionmonger
fat-witted
fathomless
featureless
fiendlike
fitful
fixture
fleshment
flirt-gill
flowery
fly-bitten
footfall
foppish
foregone
fortune-teller
foul mouthed
Franciscan
freezing
fretful
full-grown
fullhearted
futurity
gallantry
garden house
generous
gentlefolk
glow
go-between
grass plot
gravel-blind
gray-eyed
green-eyed
grief-shot
grime
gust
half-blooded
heartsore
hedge-pig
hell-born
hint
hobnail
homely
honey-tongued
hornbook
hostile
hot-blooded
howl
hunchbacked
hurly
idle-headed
ill-tempered
ill-used
impartial
imploratory
import
in question
inauspicious
indirection
indistinguishable
inducement
informal
inventorially
investment
invitation
invulnerable
jaded
juiced
keech
kickie-wickie
kitchen-wench
lackluster
ladybird
lament
land-rat
laughable
leaky
leapfrog
lewdster
loggerhead
lonely
long-legged
love letter
lustihood
lustrous
madcap
madwoman
majestic
malignancy
manager
marketable
marriage bed
militarist
mimic
misgiving
misquote
mockable
money’s worth
monumental
moonbeam
mortifying
motionless
mountaineer
multitudinous
neglect
never-ending
newsmonger
nimble-footed
noiseless
nook-shotten
obscene
ode
offenseful
offenseless
Olympian
on purpose
oppugnancy
outbreak
overblown
overcredulous
overgrowth
overview
pageantry
pale-faced
passado
paternal
pebbled
pedant
pedantical
pendulous
pignut
pious
please-man
plumpy
posture
prayerbook
priceless
profitless
Promethean
protester
published
puking (disputed)
puppy-dog
pushpin
quarrelsome
radiance
rascally
rawboned
reclusive
refractory
reinforcement
reliance
remorseless
reprieve
resolve
restoration
restraint
retirement
revokement
revolting
ring carrier
roadway
roguery
rose-cheeked
rose-lipped
rumination
ruttish
sanctimonious
satisfying
savage
savagery
schoolboy
scrimer
scrubbed
scuffle
seamy
self-abuse
shipwrecked
shooting star
shudder
silk stocking
silliness
skim milk
skimble-skamble
slugabed
soft-hearted
spectacled
spilth
spleenful
sportive
stealthy
stillborn
successful
suffocating
tanling
tardiness
time-honored
title page
to arouse
to barber
to bedabble
to belly
to besmirch
to bet
to bethump
to blanket
to cake
to canopy
to castigate
to cater
to champion
to comply
to compromise
to cow
to cudgel
to dapple
to denote
to dishearten
to dislocate
to educate
to elbow
to enmesh
to enthrone
to fishify
to glutton
to gnarl
to gossip
to grovel
to happy
to hinge
to humor
to impede
to inhearse
to inlay
to instate
to lapse
to muddy
to negotiate
to numb
to offcap
to operate
to out-Herod
to out-talk
to out-villain
to outdare
to outfrown
to outscold
to outsell
to outweigh
to overpay
to overpower
to overrate
to palate
to pander
to perplex
to petition
to rant
to reverb
to reword
to rival
to sate
to secure
to sire
to sneak
to squabble
to subcontract
to sully
to supervise
to swagger
to torture
to un muzzle
to unbosom
to uncurl
to undervalue
to undress
to unfool
to unhappy
to unsex
to widen
tortive
traditional
tranquil
transcendence
trippingly
unaccommodated
unappeased
unchanging
unclaimed
unearthy
uneducated
unfrequented
ungoverned
ungrown
unhelpful
unhidden
unlicensed
unmitigated
unmusical
unpolluted
unpublished
unquestionable
unquestioned
unreal
unrivaled
unscarred
unscratched
unsolicited
unsullied
unswayed
untutored
unvarnished
unwillingness
upstairs
useful
useless
valueless
varied
varletry
vasty
vulnerable
watchdog
water drop
water fly
well-behaved
well-bred
well-educated
well-read
wittolly
worn out
wry-necked
yelping
zany

Words That Shakespeare Invented – Resource List

10 Words Shakespeare Never Invented – Merriam-Webster does a great job dismantling myths. This article, in particular, tells you which words Shakespeare probably didn’t invent.
40 Words You Can Trace Back To William Shakespeare – Buzzfeed disregards the “never invented” words from Merriam, but does add a disclaimer: “That doesn’t necessarily mean he invented every word.”
Invented Words – This page was the center of a disputatious brouhaha with the aforementioned Buzzfeed. As it stands, however, Google likes to deliver this as a top result when you search for “Words Shakespeare Invented.”
20 Words We Owe to Shakespeare – I like the way that the author of this article draws a parallel between Shakespeare and the LOL generation.
Words and Phrases Coined by Shakespeare – This is a lengthy and straightforward list that mostly contains phrases rather than individual words.
21 everyday phrases that come straight from Shakespeare’s plays – This is a helpful resource due to the explanation of each phrase.

Words, words, words.

(Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2)