Shakespeare’s Gift to English: The 1,700 Words He Invented That You Use Every Day

Why Shakespeare Mattered to the Language

William Shakespeare wrote in the most linguistically creative period in English history. Early Modern English (roughly 1500–1700) was a language in rapid expansion — scholars were mining Latin and Greek for new words to describe Renaissance ideas; printers were standardising spelling; explorers were returning with foreign vocabulary. The language was unusually plastic, unusually receptive to new coinages, and unusually uncertain about which new words would stick.

Into this environment, Shakespeare brought an extraordinary combination of linguistic creativity, theatrical need, and cultural reach. He needed new words constantly — to fill verse, to characterise speakers, to describe new emotions and situations — and he had both the ear and the boldness to invent them. His plays reached every level of Elizabethan society, from groundlings to the Queen. The words he used in his plays were heard thousands of times in performance before they appeared in print, embedding themselves in the language through sound as much as through text.

By the time Samuel Johnson compiled his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 — the first major standardising dictionary — he quoted Shakespeare more than any other writer. Johnson’s dictionary effectively canonised Shakespearean vocabulary as standard English. Words that Shakespeare had stretched or invented were now defined, exemplified, and legitimised. The vocabulary of Early Modern English theatrical language had become the vocabulary of written English.

How Shakespeare Coined New Words

Shakespeare used several distinct techniques to create or adapt vocabulary. The most productive was conversion — taking a word of one grammatical class and using it as another. He turned nouns into verbs with particular freedom: to “elbow” someone (push with the elbow), to “champion” a cause, to “gossip” (from the noun for a rumour-spreading friend). He turned verbs into nouns: a “swagger,” a “rant,” a “dawn.” This conversion technique is one of English’s greatest strengths as a language, and Shakespeare exploited it constantly.

His second technique was compounding — joining two existing words into a new one. Cold-blooded, eyeball, lackluster, bedroom, footfall, birthplace, bedroom — these are all Shakespearean compounds. The method follows exactly the patterns of Old English word formation, suggesting that Shakespeare understood intuitively how English had always made new words from old ones.

Third, he borrowed freely from Latin and Italian, anglicising classical vocabulary for theatrical effect. When he needed a word of elevated tone, he went to Latin. When he needed something exotic or sensuous, he went to Italian. Words like “obscene” (Latin obscaenus), “generous” (Latin generosus), and “accommodation” (Latin accommodatio) entered everyday English through their use in Shakespeare’s plays.

Fourth, and perhaps most productively, he added prefixes and suffixes systematically. The prefix un- was a particular favourite: uncomfortable, unaware, undress, unreal, unearthly, unsolicited — Shakespeare created dozens of words by attaching un- to existing adjectives and verbs. This technique was so productive that it is now one of the most active word-formation processes in English.

The Words That Stuck and the Words That Didn’t

Not every word Shakespeare coined survived. He used hundreds of words that appear once in his plays and then disappear from the record — what linguists call “hapax legomena” (words occurring only once). “Honorificabilitudinitatibus” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. “Anthropophaginian” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. These were linguistic experiments that did not take root. The words that survived were those that filled genuine gaps in the vocabulary — concepts that English speakers needed to express and had no adequate word for.

“Lonely” is a perfect example. Before Shakespeare, English had “alone” (describing physical solitude) but not a word for the emotional state of feeling isolated even in company. Shakespeare’s “lonely” filled that gap so precisely that it has never been displaced. Similarly, “bedroom” was simply more practical than “bedchamber” — shorter, more direct, more English-sounding. The compound won because it was useful.

Shakespeare’s Phrases: The Idioms That Outlasted the Plays

Beyond individual words, Shakespeare contributed dozens of phrases to the English language that are now used by speakers who have never read the plays. “Break the ice” (from The Taming of the Shrew — to make a start on something difficult). “Full circle” (from King Lear). “Heart of gold” (from Henry V). “In a pickle” (from The Tempest — in a difficult situation). “Star-crossed” (from Romeo and Juliet — destined for misfortune). “Wild-goose chase” (from Romeo and Juliet — a futile pursuit). “All that glitters is not gold” (from The Merchant of Venice). “The world is your oyster” (from The Merry Wives of Windsor).

These phrases survived because they expressed ideas with an economy and vividness that subsequent alternatives could not match. They are so embedded in English that most speakers do not know they are quoting Shakespeare when they use them — which is, perhaps, the ultimate measure of linguistic influence. Shakespeare’s words have become invisible inside the language they helped to shape.

The Legacy: Shakespeare’s English Is Our English

The scope of Shakespeare’s contribution to English vocabulary is staggering when you sit with it. Every “lonely” person, every “bedroom,” every “eyeball,” every “dawn,” every instance of “generous,” “obscene,” “swagger,” “addiction,” and “rant” — these are all Shakespearean coinages, used billions of times per day in a language that has 1.5 billion speakers. No other individual in the history of any language has made a comparable contribution to its vocabulary.

Shakespeare could only do this because Early Modern English was ready to be shaped. The language was expanding rapidly, the printing press was spreading new words, and there was no dictionary yet to say what was “correct” and what was not. Shakespeare wrote in that brief window of creative freedom — and he used it more fully than anyone before or since.