Shakespeare: The Man Who Invented Your Vocabulary

William Shakespeare wasn't just a playwright. He was a one-man vocabulary factory, churning out new words with the casual confidence of someone who knew nobody could stop him. After all, who was going to tell the most popular writer in England that "eyeball" wasn't a real word?

The Bard coined hundreds of words that have become so embedded in English that we forget they had to be invented at all. "Lonely," "generous," "assassination," "bedroom," "uncomfortable"—all Shakespeare originals.

How Do You Just... Make Up Words?

Shakespeare's word-creation fell into a few categories:

• Prefixes and suffixes: He'd slap "un-" onto things with abandon. "Uncomfortable," "undress," "unreal"—if it wasn't negative enough, he made it so.
• Noun-to-verb conversions: Why say "to make an elbow" when you could just "elbow" someone? He verbed nouns before it was cool.
• Compound words: "Eyeball" is literally just "eye" + "ball." Simple. Obvious in retrospect. Nobody had done it before.
• Pure invention: Some words, like "assassination," seem to have sprung fully formed from his imagination.

The Numbers Game

You'll often hear that Shakespeare invented "1,700 words" or even "over 2,000." The real number is trickier to pin down. What scholars can say with confidence is that Shakespeare provides the first recorded written usage of hundreds of words. Whether he invented them or simply wrote down slang that was already floating around London's taverns is harder to prove.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the earliest citation for words like "lackluster," "swagger," "rant," and "zany." Even if he didn't invent every single one, he clearly had a gift for capturing language at the moment it crystallized into permanence.

Words That Didn't Catch On

Not every Shakespearean coinage stuck around. "Abrook" (to tolerate), "bepaint" (to paint over), and "co-mart" (a joint bargain) have quietly disappeared from English. Language is democratic that way—it keeps what it finds useful and discards the rest.

But the words that survived? They're everywhere. Next time you call someone a "lonely" person with "lackluster" ideas who makes you "uncomfortable," you're speaking pure Shakespeare—and you probably didn't even know it.