What words did Shakespeare make up?

The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original. read more

Much Like Richard Dawkins and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, People believe that William Shakespeare also created English words. Some lovers of Shakespeare insist that as many as 20,000 new words can be credited to him. That is almost certainly an hyperbole that somehow transformed into legend. read more

Of course, just because the first written instances of these terms appeared in Shakespeare’s scripts doesn’t preclude the possibility that they existed in the oral tradition prior to his recording them, but as Shakespeare might have said, it was high time (The Comedy of Errors) for such household words (Henry V). read more