Shakespeare's Vocabulary — Words He Gave Us

The Numbers — and Why They Vary

The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest known written use of each word. When that earliest use appears in Shakespeare, he gets the credit. But spoken language runs ahead of written language by years or decades, and many words he "first recorded" were probably already in common speech before he wrote them down.

The lower estimate (around 700) counts only words with no earlier written record anywhere. The higher estimate (over 1,700) includes words where Shakespeare's is simply the earliest surviving text — a wider and less certain category. Both figures are defensible. Neither means Shakespeare sat down and invented hundreds of words. He worked in a language that was expanding rapidly, and he expanded it further.

Words You Use Every Day

"Lonely" first appears in Coriolanus (around 1607–08). "Eyeball" first appears in Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 7 (written around 1590–92). "Swagger" appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream (around 1595–96). "Cold-blooded" appears in King John (around 1595–96). "Uncomfortable" appears in Romeo and Juliet. "Addiction" appears in Othello.

These words feel so ordinary now that attributing them to Shakespeare can seem suspicious. But the records are there in the OED. Each of these is Shakespeare's earliest surviving written use.

The Problem With 'First Recorded Use'

"First recorded use" does not mean Shakespeare invented the word. It means that, in the surviving written record, his text is the earliest place we find it. A word might have been in spoken circulation for decades before any writer thought to put it on a page.

What made Shakespeare's vocabulary unusual was its size and range. Most writers of his era drew on a narrower pool of words. He borrowed from Latin, borrowed from French, pushed existing nouns into use as verbs, invented compound adjectives. The result is a writer whose texts contain a disproportionately large number of early records.

Words That Disappeared

For every word Shakespeare used that stuck, others vanished. "Tortive" (twisting), "smilet" (a small smile), "conflux" (a flowing together) — these appeared in the plays and went no further. Language keeps what it needs.

The words that survived did so because they were useful, not because Shakespeare put them there. "Lonely," "swagger" and "eyeball" filled gaps that speakers needed filled. "Tortive" did not.

The Scale of His Vocabulary

Of the estimated 17,000 to 20,000 distinct words in Shakespeare's total output, roughly three to four per cent appear nowhere else in the surviving written record. That is a striking proportion. It tells you something about how actively he worked with language — coining compounds, borrowing from other languages, pushing existing words into new grammatical roles.

For comparison, the average educated adult speaker of English today uses around 20,000 to 35,000 words in their active vocabulary. Shakespeare's total written vocabulary is in roughly the same range, but was being produced across a lifetime of writing rather than a lifetime of speaking.

Why It Matters

The claim that Shakespeare "gave us" these words is not just a trivia point. It is evidence of how central his writing became to the language. His plays were read, quoted, adapted and re-performed for four centuries. The words that entered English through him entered it because millions of readers and theatregoers encountered them and found them useful.

For a longer list of words and phrases that trace back to Shakespeare, see 25 Shakespeare phrases we still use today and the Shakespeare facts page.

Read 25 Shakespeare phrases we still use →