The Words Shakespeare Invented (and the Ones He Didn’t)

You've heard the claim. Shakespeare invented 1,700 words. He gave us eyeball and lonely and bedazzled; we walk around all day speaking his coinages without knowing it. It's one of those facts that gets repeated so confidently, in so many places, that questioning it feels almost rude. So of course I went and questioned it.

What I found is that the truth is neither "he invented everything" nor "he invented nothing." It's something more subtle, and more revealing about how we even decide who invented a word in the first place.

Where the number comes from

The famous figure traces back to the Oxford English Dictionary, which credits Shakespeare with the first recorded use of around 1,700 words. And that phrase - first recorded use - is where the whole myth quietly goes wrong.

The OED's job is to find the earliest surviving written instance of a word. If Shakespeare's play is the oldest document a word appears in, he gets the citation. But being the first to write a word down is not the same as being the first to use it. A word could have been common in the taverns and streets of London for years - spoken by thousands - before it happened to land in a text that survived. Shakespeare wrote a great deal, and his work was preserved with unusual care, which means he's often simply the earliest surviving witness, not the author, of a word.

The ones he didn't invent

Here's what's changed the picture. As older books, letters, and pamphlets have been digitized and made searchable, scholars keep finding earlier uses of words once credited to Shakespeare. The digital haystack is finally searchable, and needles keep turning up that predate him.

Take the ones from my own opening. Lonely is often handed to Shakespeare, but the raw material - lonelinesse and alone-based forms - was already in circulation; his real contribution was popularity, not creation. Eyeball gets credited to him too, yet the plain compound of eye and ball is exactly the kind of obvious construction other people surely reached before he happened to write it in a play that survived. Even a word as Shakespearean-sounding as swagger is on shakier ground than the myth admits - he's an early witness, not a proven inventor.

And then there are the ones that were never his at all, only attached to him by reputation. Grand-sounding words get magnetically drawn to famous names, and Shakespeare is the biggest magnet in English. A word feels clever, a play is old, the two get married in a listicle, and a coinage is born - not in the sixteenth century, but in the footnote of someone who wanted a good fact.

So the 1,700 number has been shrinking for years, and it will keep shrinking. Many words Shakespeare got credit for were already out there; he was just the first whose use of them we can still read. It isn't that he was less brilliant than we thought. It's that the OED citation was always measuring something narrower than "invention" - and we mistook the measurement for the thing.

What he genuinely did

But don't let me overcorrect into the fashionable cynicism that says Shakespeare did nothing new. He very likely did coin words, and he certainly did something arguably more important than coining: he took the language and bent it, hard, in ways that stuck.

His real signature move was conversion - turning one part of speech into another. He used nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns with a freedom that still feels modern. When a character says he'll dog someone, or that something has been uncled, or speaks of the seasons of a life as a verb, that flexibility is the genuinely Shakespearean thing - not a list of new words, but a new willingness to make words do jobs they hadn't done before.

And whatever the dictionary says about coinage, he was unquestionably a great popularizer. Words and phrases may have existed before him, but they entered the bloodstream of English because he put them in the mouths of characters that would be performed and quoted for four hundred years. That's a different kind of authorship, and arguably a more powerful one.

The phrases we really do owe him

The stronger claim is about phrases, where Shakespeare's fingerprints are clearer. Whether or not he invented every word, he assembled combinations that became permanent fixtures. Wild-goose chase. In a pickle. Break the ice. Heart of gold. Wear my heart on my sleeve. Foregone conclusion. Even here a careful scholar will hedge - some may have been in circulation - but the concentration of lasting phrases in his work is real, and not a myth.

When you use one of these, you're doing something quietly extraordinary: repeating a specific arrangement of words a particular writer set down four centuries ago, still working, still doing its job. Most sentences ever written have vanished. These few keep being spoken.

Why the distinction matters

I care about getting this right for a reason beyond pedantry. The "Shakespeare invented 1,700 words" myth quietly misrepresents how language actually works - as though words spring fully formed from the heads of geniuses, gifts handed down to the rest of us. They don't. Words emerge from the messy, collective, mostly unrecorded talk of ordinary people, and the great writer's role is usually to catch them, sharpen them, and set them where they'll last.

That's a humbler and truer picture of a writer's craft, and honestly a more useful one. You don't have to invent language to do something remarkable with it. Shakespeare mostly didn't invent his words - he listened harder than anyone else to the words already in the air, and found astonishing things for them to do. That, I think, is the part actually worth stealing.