Coinage of words by William Shakespeare

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william shakes peare was a very poor person at the time

Changes in English at the time

Early Modern English as a literary medium was unfixed in structure and vocabulary in comparison to Greek and Latin, and was in a constant state of flux. When William Shakespeare began writing his plays, the English language was rapidly absorbing words from other cultures due to wars, exploration, diplomacy, and colonization. By the age of Elizabeth, English had become widely used with the expansion of philosophy, theology and physical sciences, but many writers lacked the vocabulary to express such ideas. To accommodate, writers such as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare expressed new ideas and distinctions by inventing, borrowing or adopting a word or a phrase from another language, known as neologizing. 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.

Words used by Shakespeare

In all his plays, Shakespeare reveals his interest for the evolving ideas, words and literary traditions of his time. It is widely assumed that Shakespeare himself introduced more words into English than all the other writers of his time combined, over 1,700 by some estimates. However, calculating the number of words Shakespeare coined is difficult. First, one must define the meaning of coinage. Should variations of existing words or existing words to which he gave new meaning be counted? Should one consider compound words? Also, one must take into account that a word might be considered of Shakespearean origins only because his works have been more thoroughly scrutinized than others of his time. A word might also have existed in oral communication long before Shakespeare set it to paper.

Shakespeare’s own contribution to the expansion of the English language was noticed as early as 1598, when commentator Francis Meres, applauding English literature in relation to the classics, placed Shakespeare among the writers who had dignified the language. Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics and scholars began to doubt whether Shakespeare had a significant effect on the expansion of English vocabulary. This is mainly based on the neoclassical image of him as a poor Latinist. In the early twentieth century, there was an overreaction to this, so that one critic credited William Shakespeare with having coined nearly 10,000 words.

Although it is often difficult, if not often impossible, to determine the true origin of a word, for many words, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists a quotation from Shakespeare as its earliest example. However, proceeding from this to the conclusion that Shakespeare invented the words or additional senses is dubious at best. The editors of the OED did not search through every surviving text for every word to find the earliest quotation. Not only would this be an impossible task before the digitization of all surviving texts, but they were interested in quotations that were illustrative of the word's meaning. Furthermore, in their reading programme, they explicitly instructed their volunteer readers to search in the Elizabethan period for words not in the concordance to Shakespeare. The earliest citations in the OED by Shakespeare should not be taken as earliest usages but rather as examples of editorial bias. Further information can be found in the following sources: Lexicography and the OED edited by Lynda Mugglestone, Documentation in the OED by Jürgen Schäfer, and Empire of Words by John Willinsky.

Sources

• Shakespeare and the Origins of Language by Neil Rhodes
• Growth and Structure of the English Language by Otto Jespersen
• Shakespeare and the Arts of Language by Russ McDonald
• Lexicography and the OED edited by Lynda Mugglestone
• Documentation in the OED by Jürgen Schäfer
• Empire of Words by John Willinsky