How Many Words Did Shakespeare Invent?
You’ll see the number 1,700 everywhere — but it’s misleading. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Shakespeare as the first recorded user of roughly 1,700 words. Being first to write a word down is not the same as inventing it. Strip out the words he merely recorded first or built obviously from existing ones, and the best modern estimate of his genuine coinages is closer to 1,000 — and even that keeps falling. Still extraordinary; just not the tidy 1,700 you always see.
How many words do you think Shakespeare actually invented?
Where the “1,700 words” figure comes from
The number traces back to the Oxford English Dictionary. As the OED was compiled, its editors recorded the earliest known use of each word they could find in print — and because Shakespeare was widely printed, widely read and minutely studied, his works supplied an enormous share of those “first citations”. Tally them and you get close to 1,700 words for which Shakespeare is the earliest recorded source, plus several thousand more for which he provides an early example.
But here is the catch the headline always skips. A “first citation” only means his is the oldest surviving written example we have found. It does not mean he made the word up. Plenty of his “firsts” were everyday spoken words that simply hadn’t made it into a surviving printed book yet — and Shakespeare, writing for a popular theatre, put them on the page.
The linguist David Crystal did the careful version of this count. Working from the OED, he found roughly 2,035 words for which Shakespeare is the earliest recorded user. He then filtered out every word that another writer used within 25 years — words unlikely to be true coinages — and was left with about 1,392 plausible inventions. The famous “1,700” is essentially the midpoint of those two figures. And Crystal’s own headline estimate has only fallen since: he now puts the genuine coinages at “about one thousand.” Earlier scholars once claimed as many as 3,200; as the OED digitises older books, words keep getting re-dated away from Shakespeare.
That is the tension this whole page is built around. The widget above lets you feel it: lock in a guess, and watch the gap between the famous figure and the honest one.
Coined, first-recorded, or a myth?
Three buckets, one rule: green means no earlier record exists, amber means he was just first to write it down, red means he gets the credit wrongly. Flip the cards.
Everyday phrases Shakespeare gave us
Even where the individual words are old, the phrasings are often his — and these have a far stronger claim than the single-word list. You almost certainly used one this week without knowing its source. Each of these is first recorded in the play beside it.
Surprising facts about his words
The trivia that actually checks out — plus a couple of English-language oddities his name always drags along with it.
Which word is first recorded in Hamlet?
“Rant.” His longest play also gives the first written “rant” — fitting for a play full of them.
Which word debuts in The Comedy of Errors?
“Gossip.” His shortest play hands us one of the most-used social words in English.
What rhymes with “orange”, “silver” and “month”?
Nothing in common use. These are the famous unrhymable English words — a favourite pub-quiz trap.
Which everyday room is a Shakespeare first-citation?
“Bedroom.” The OED’s earliest record is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Did he really coin “assassination” and “bump”?
Both are first recorded in his plays — “assassination” in Macbeth — though “first recorded” is doing heavy lifting, as ever.
How many of his coinages do we still use?
Roughly half. The other half — like “tortive” and “vastidity” — never caught on and died with the plays.
Quiz 1 — Name the play
Ten of the most famous lines Shakespeare ever wrote. Match each to the play it comes from.
Every Shakespeare play, sorted
Shakespeare wrote around 39 plays — the exact count is debated because of co-written and lost works. The First Folio of 1623 grouped them as comedies, histories and tragedies; later scholars added a fourth “romance” group for his late plays. Filter the canon below.
The plays, in order of writing
His career runs from bloody early experiments like Titus Andronicus to the serene late romances. Watch the genres shift across roughly two decades.
Game — tragedy, comedy, history or romance?
Ten plays, four genres. Sounds easy — until you remember scholars still argue about where the late plays belong.
The Seven Ages of Man
His most quoted single speech after “To be or not to be” comes from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage.” In it, the melancholy Jaques divides a human life into seven stages — from squalling infant to toothless old age. Tap each age to read the lines and what they mean.
The sonnets — and the most famous one of all
Beyond the plays, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, published together in 1609. Each is 14 lines in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme that now bears his name: the English or “Shakespearean” sonnet. The best known is Sonnet 18 — “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” — quoted at weddings and funerals four centuries later.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The poem’s boast is literal: the final couplet promises that the lines themselves will keep their subject alive “so long as men can breathe”. Four hundred years on, you reading it is the promise being kept.
The book that saved Shakespeare: the First Folio
Here is the fact that should unsettle anyone counting his words: most of Shakespeare’s plays were never printed in his lifetime. Had nothing changed, around half of them — including Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and As You Like It — would simply have vanished.
They survive because in 1623, seven years after his death, two of his fellow actors — John Heminge and Henry Condell — gathered 36 plays into a single large volume titled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. We call it the First Folio. It was the first time anyone grouped his plays into those three categories — the scheme we still half-use today. Eighteen of its 36 plays had never appeared in print before.
Only around 750 copies were printed, of which roughly 235 survive. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. holds the largest collection in the world. Without this one book, the question “how many words did Shakespeare invent” would be missing half its evidence — because half the plays would not exist.
The fourth genre. The Folio used three buckets — comedy, history, tragedy. Modern scholars added a fourth, romance, for the strange, redemptive late plays like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale that don’t fit the original three. That is why the genre game above has four buttons, not three.
Quiz 2 — Coined, recorded, or myth?
The trickier quiz. Now that you know the difference between “invented” and “first written down”, can you separate the real coinages from the myths?
William Shakespeare: the man behind the words
William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and died there in 1616, on or near his 52nd birthday. We have surprisingly few hard facts about his life — no diaries, no manuscripts in his own hand for the plays — which is exactly why so many myths, including the word-count one, have had room to grow.
In 1582, aged 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26 and already pregnant with their first child, Susanna. They later had twins, Hamnet and Judith; Hamnet died at 11, a loss some scholars hear echoing through the later tragedies. In his will, Shakespeare famously left Anne his “second-best bed” — a line that has launched centuries of speculation, though it may simply have been the marital bed and a fond bequest rather than a snub.
From around 1594 he was a leading member and shareholder of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), which performed at the open-air Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. The original Globe burned down in 1613 when a stage cannon misfired during a performance of Henry VIII — a rare dated event in his otherwise shadowy biography.
Shakespeare’s Globe in London is a faithful 1997 reconstruction near the original site. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. holds the world’s largest collection of First Folios. And every summer, free open-air “Shakespeare in the Park” productions run in New York and dozens of other cities — the closest modern equivalent to the rowdy, popular theatre he actually wrote for.
Shakespeare on screen
His plots are so durable they keep being remade — sometimes openly, sometimes in disguise. A few you may already know without realising the source.
Baz Luhrmann’s neon, gun-toting Verona Beach — Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes speaking the original verse over modern guns labelled “Sword”.
A fictional romance imagining how Romeo and Juliet got written. Won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.
Not credited, but its plot — murdered king, exiled prince, usurping uncle, a haunting — is Hamlet in the savanna.
The Taming of the Shrew relocated to an American high school. Proof the plots still work 400 years on.
Kenneth Branagh’s uncut, four-hour, full-text version — the entire play, every line, on 70mm film.
Does the real number make him smaller — or larger?
It is tempting to feel cheated when the 1,700 figure deflates. But look at what survives the correction. The genuine coinages — swagger, gloomy, lonely, bedazzled — and the phrases — break the ice, brave new world, wear your heart on your sleeve — are not obscure technical terms. They are words and images so useful that English absorbed them whole and never let go. That is a rarer gift than inventing a thousand words nobody repeats.
And there is a deeper point hiding in the myth. The reason Shakespeare “owns” so many first citations is that he was read and recorded more carefully than almost anyone else of his era. The dictionary is, in part, a map of who got studied — not simply who spoke first. The 1,700 number is less a measure of his invention than a measure of his influence.
Which is the better tribute anyway: a man credited with a thousand words on a technicality, or one whose genuine coinages are still in your mouth today? The honest number doesn’t shrink Shakespeare. It just tells the truth about why we still quote him.
Frequently asked questions
So how many words did Shakespeare really invent?
He is the first recorded user of roughly 1,700 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, but genuine coinages — words with no earlier source and not obviously built from existing ones — are now estimated at around 1,000 and falling, per linguist David Crystal. “First recorded” and “invented” are different claims.
How many plays did Shakespeare write?
Around 39, depending on how you count co-written and disputed works. The 1623 First Folio collected 36; later editors added Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and sometimes the lost play Cardenio is counted.
How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?
154, published together in 1609. Each has 14 lines and the rhyme scheme now called the Shakespearean sonnet. Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) is the most famous.
What is the most famous Shakespeare quote?
“To be, or not to be — that is the question,” from Hamlet, is the single most quoted line. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” from Romeo and Juliet is close behind — and “wherefore” means “why”, not “where”.
Who was Anne Hathaway?
Shakespeare’s wife. They married in 1582 when he was 18 and she was 26. She is not to be confused with the modern actress of the same name. He left her his “second-best bed” in his will.
Sources
- Oxford English Dictionary — first-citation data for Shakespeare (~1,700 words first recorded in his works).
- David Crystal & Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words; David Crystal, The Stories of English (2004) and Think on My Words (2008) — the 2,035 → ~1,392 → ~1,000 coinage methodology.
- Folger Shakespeare Library & Shakespeare Birthplace Trust — First Folio (1623): 36 plays, 18 never previously printed, ~235 surviving copies; the comedy/history/tragedy grouping.
- Britannica & Wikipedia, “First Folio” and “Shakespeare’s plays” — Heminge and Condell, the ~750 print run, and the modern fourth “romance” category.
- OED first-citation data — “rant” (Hamlet), “gossip” (The Comedy of Errors), “assassination” (Macbeth); ~884,647 words and 118,406 lines across the works.
- Royal Shakespeare Company / Shakespeare’s Globe — biography, the 1613 Globe fire during Henry VIII, and play groupings.
- Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (eds.), The Oxford Shakespeare — dating of the plays and the canon count.
Related
He may not have invented 1,700 words. But four centuries later you still break the ice, chase wild geese and wear your heart on your sleeve — in his words, whether you meant to or not.