How many words did Shakespeare invent?
A one man vocabulary factory
Even with the most powerful computers available to us, counting words is a is a very tricky calculation. Do we include repetitions? Grammatical variations? Different parts of speech?
No Sweat Shakespeare ignores these linguistic technicalities. It confidently declares that across the collected works, ‘Shakespeare uses 17,677 different words.’ The pointy heads in the Osnabrück University English Department beg to differ. They raise the word count by a factor of 50.
884,647 words scribbled with (a lot of) quill pens. And without predictive text or a spellcheck or a glance-at-your-screen word counter. To quote from one of the Bard’s few box office flops: ‘Our amazement hurries up and down’ King John, 5.1.37
Of course, naysayers would point out that the 884,647 includes every repeated the, thee and thou. Without repetitions the word count reduces to 31,534. That’s still a long way north of 17,677, even allowing for variables.
Bravely the Osnabrück University scholars also claim that, “there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn’t use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.”
Hmm. That’s an awful lot of approximating from the Herr Profs. A safer conclusion would be that William Shakespeare used more words than any writer in any language. And a large number of these cannot be traced to an earlier source.
How many of these magically emerged from his phenomenal imagination? How many of these words and phrases now part of our mental furniture did William Shakespeare invent?
Scholarly Dispute Shock
In 1942, Alfred Hart, then a leading authority on Shakespeare’s vocabulary, wrote “Shakespeare is credited by the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary with being the first user of about 3,200 words.” This became the accepted wisdom in the academe, but begged an obvious question.
How did this torrent of new words go down with the groundlings at the Globe? Why wasn’t there a collective howl of ‘That was Greek to me’ and a blizzard of flying fruit hurled at the players?
Theatre goers didn’t hand over their hard-earned groats to be baffled by incomprehensible dialogue. Sixteenth century audiences were less forgiving than our ones in this respect.
Okay, maybe not quite 3,000…
A consensus has emerged that Hart’s ‘first user’ figure was probably an overestimate. But when it comes to producing a more realistic figure, scholarly calculations have again been all over the numbers map.
A British Council website from 2016 suggests ‘more than two thousand’. The Online Shakespeare Biography goes with ‘around 1200’. The OUP, for its part, has calibrated its original 3,200 ‘earliest citations’ with a more tentative claim for ‘over 1600’.
Linguistics Professor Jonathan Culpeper, from the University of Lancaster, has gone back to the (digital) abacus. His team has been working for several years on the The Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language, a computer based analysis of the full corpus.
Culpeper suggests that Stratford vocabulary production figure have been about as reliable as Soviet ones. “Shakespeare, we think, recorded somewhere in the order of 400 new words.”
Just 400? Perhaps the Bard is not the lexical Big Dog after all?
Professor Culpeper reminds us that this is still an astounding number for a single author. The closest competitor is Charles Dickens with 265 ‘first entries’ while “modern writers are lucky if they’ve invented one word.”
Preach it, Prof.
Teaching activity listening quiz: Words invented by Shakespeare
How did Dickens expand the English language
