Do you like Shakespeare?
…..Some writers invent words in the same way Thomas Edison invented light bulbs: they cobble together bits of sound and create entirely new words without any meaning or relation to existing words. Lewis Carroll does in the first stanza of his “Jabberwocky” poem:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Carroll totally made up words like “brillig,” “slithy,” “toves,” and “mimsy”; the first stanza alone contains 11 of these made-up words, which are known as nonce words. Words like these aren’t just meaningless, they’re also disposable, intended to be used just once.
Shakespeare did not create nonce words. He took an entirely different approach. When he invented words, he did it by working with existing words and altering them in new ways. More specifically, he would create new words by:
- Conjoining two words
- Changing verbs into adjectives
- Changing nouns into verbs
- Adding prefixes to words
- Adding suffixes to words……
Though today readers often need the help of
modern English translations to fully grasp the nuance and meaning of Shakespeare’s language, Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would have had a much easier go of it. Why? Two main reasons.
First, Shakespeare was part of a
movement in English literature that introduced more prose into plays. (Earlier plays were written primarily in rhyming verse.) Shakespeare’s prose was similar to the style and cadence of everyday conversation in Elizabethan England, making it natural for members of his audience to understand.
In addition, the words he created were comprehensible intuitively because, once again, they were often built on the foundations of already existing words, and were not just unintelligible combinations of sound. Take “congreeted” for example. The prefix “con” means
with, and “greet” means
to receive or acknowledge someone.
It therefore wasn’t a huge stretch for people to understand this line:
That, face to face and royal eye to eye.
You have congreeted.
(
Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare also made nouns into verbs. He was the first person to use friend as a verb, predating Mark Zuckerberg by about 395 years.
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you
(
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)
Other times, despite his proclivity for making compound words, Shakespeare reached into his vast Latin vocabulary for loanwords.
His heart fracted and corroborate.
(
Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1)
Here the Latin word
fractus means “broken.” Take away the –us and
add in the English suffix –ed, and a new English word is born….
Compiling a definitive list of every word that Shakespeare ever invented is impossible. But creating a list of the words that Shakespeare almostcertainly invented can be done. We generated list of words below by starting with the words that Shakespeare was the first to use in written language, and then applying research that has identified which words were probably in everyday use during Shakespeare’s time. The result are 420 bona fide words minted, coined, and invented by Shakespeare, from “academe” to “zany”:
- academe
- accessible
- accommodation
- addiction
- admirable
- aerial
- airless
- amazement
- anchovy
- arch-villain
- auspicious
- bacheolorship
- barefaced
- baseless
- batty
- beachy
- bedroom
- belongings
- birthplace
- black-faced
- bloodstained
- bloodsucking
- blusterer
- bodikins
- braggartism
- brisky
- broomstaff
- budger
- bump
- buzzer
- candle holder
- catlike
- characterless
- cheap
- chimney-top……
https://www.litcharts.com/blog/shakespeare/words-shakespeare-invented/