Shakespeare is credited with inventing more than 1,700 words. The figure counts the words whose earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is Shakespeare's, which is not proof that he made them up, and as the OED revises its entries and scholars search digitised early printed books, many of those first examples have been beaten by older ones.
EdCitation publishes this guide. Every number and date comes from the page or paper that gives it, read on 2 October 2026; where sources disagree we show both, and a figure we could not trace to its origin is marked as reported.
For an essay on Shakespeare's language, EdCitation's free Find sources searches about 300 million published works for the scholarship, Cite a source builds each reference from the publisher's record, and Verify references confirms the finished list.
How many words did Shakespeare invent?
Nobody knows; it depends on what is counted. The popular figure is 1,700; counts of the OED's Shakespeare first citations have run from about 3,200 down to about 1,400; and a search of his contemporaries' printed books suggests around 500 words that really do appear first in his writing (Culpeper & Gillings, 2022).
Where the 1,700 figure appears
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (n.d.) credits him with inventing or introducing over 1,700 words still in use. The Royal Shakespeare Company (n.d.) gives 1,700 because he was the first author to write them down, and the British Council (2024) calls him the first person known to use more than 1,700. Merriam-Webster (2016) collects the belief in the wild, from a Snapple "Real Fact" on assassination to a 2016 newspaper column crediting him with break the ice, manager and uncomfortable.
Where the figure came from
From David Crystal's analysis of the OED's second edition in The Stories of English (2004), as Brewer (2012) sets it out. On the OED2 CD-ROM, Crystal found Shakespeare named as first user of 2,035 headwords, leaving out malapropisms and nonsense words. He then allowed for the dictionary's habits: about 300 words recorded only in Shakespeare, about 1,100 not recorded again for 25 years or more, and half of some 640 taken up by others within 25 years, since those may have been arriving anyway. The sum is about 1,700.
Brewer objects that this treats the OED as a record of how often a word was used, which it is not: its editors sometimes printed several quotations from one decade and skipped others. Battistella (2016) reports an older count, Alfred Hart's mid-twentieth-century figure of about 3,200, which we did not read at source, and an OED search in 2016 that returned 1,614.
What does the OED itself say about first citations?
The OED says its first quotation is the earliest evidence its editors have found, and almost never the first use. Its guide says the first quotation is, with very few exceptions, "not the first time this word or sense has ever been used", because words are spoken long before they are written, and earlier uses may sit in texts the editors have not seen (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-a).
Each entry says how current it is. A revised entry carries the year of its revision and draws on newly available texts and digital corpora; a "not fully revised" entry often still reflects the second edition of 1989 (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.-b). All three entries in our table where Shakespeare still comes first are not fully revised.
Why Shakespeare was quoted so often
Brewer (2012) counts 33,000-odd Shakespeare quotations in the OED, more than twice the next writer, Walter Scott. The first editors and their volunteer readers favoured literature, Shakespeare above all, so a new word he used was likelier to be found in his plays than in books they read less closely. How those readers worked is in our guide to the OED and its volunteers; Johnson had already quoted Shakespeare by name in his Dictionary of 1755.
What revision has done so far
Brewer compared the revised stretch from M to rotness with the second edition, as of November 2010. Shakespeare was first user of the headword in 406 entries of the old text and 263 of the new: earlier evidence had been found for about a third. If that held across the alphabet, she estimated, his 2,000-odd first words would fall to about 1,200, still more than any writer since the Middle Ages. A smaller study she cites, by the OED lexicographer Giles Goodland, found nearly half of 117 words in P to Ra antedated.
Dating changes the order too. The revised OED dates plays first printed in the 1623 First Folio "a1616", before Shakespeare's death, so a play performed years earlier can lose first place: majestic, once credited to Julius Caesar, now starts with John Davies in 1606 (Brewer, 2012). Brewer also records the other side: revision keeps finding new senses first used by Shakespeare.
What have digitised early printed books changed?
They let scholars search Shakespeare's contemporaries as closely as the OED's readers searched him. Early English Books Online holds more than 125,000 volumes printed from 1475 to 1700, and its Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) has transcribed tens of thousands for word-by-word searching; the 25,368 texts of its first phase were released to the public on 1 January 2015 (Text Creation Partnership, n.d.).
Jonathan Culpeper, who leads the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language project at Lancaster University, described the method in an interview (Plescia, 2016). His team took the roughly 1,400 words the OED records as first cited from Shakespeare and searched for each in a 321-million-word corpus of his contemporaries' writing from EEBO-TCP, with software to even out early modern spelling. Halfway through, about a third looked like genuine new words. Culpeper and Gillings (2022) later put the total at around 500.
Even those may not be inventions: their example, hobnail, was probably said before anyone wrote it, and the OED's 2025 revision of hobnail now has evidence from 1578. Vocabulary size is a separate myth: Craig (2011), comparing Shakespeare's plays with many by other writers, found his vocabulary large only because more of his plays survive, according to the article's abstract.
Which words did Shakespeare really invent? Twelve checked
Three of these twelve still start with Shakespeare; for the other nine, the OED or Merriam-Webster records an earlier use or another writer first. Years are Britannica's dates of composition (Bevington, 2026); OED dates are from each entry's public factsheet.
| Word or phrase | Play and year | Earliest use the dictionary now records | Shakespeare first? | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| assassination | Macbeth, 1606–07 | 1610, a translated title, with Macbeth second; Merriam-Webster: a 1572 letter | No | OED (revised 2014), Merriam-Webster (2016) |
| lonely | Coriolanus, 1608 | Before 1616, Shakespeare | Yes | OED (not fully revised) |
| swagger | Henry IV, Part 2, 1597–98 | 1599, Thomas Nashe | No, in the OED | OED (not fully revised) |
| bedroom | A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1595–96 | Around 1570 | No | OED (revised 2025) |
| eyeball | Henry VI, Part 1, 1589–92 | 1575, William Patten | No | OED (revised 2014) |
| obscene | Love's Labour's Lost, 1588–97 | 1571, a translation by E. Grant | No | OED (revised 2004) |
| outbreak | Hamlet, 1599–1601 | 1562, a translation by Thomas Phaer | No | OED (revised 2004) |
| gloomy | Titus Andronicus, 1589–92 | Before 1593, Christopher Marlowe | No, in the OED | OED (not fully revised) |
| majestic | Julius Caesar, 1599–1600 | 1606, John Davies | No, by the OED's dating | OED (revised 2000) |
| break the ice | The Taming of the Shrew, 1590–94 | About 1577 | No | Merriam-Webster |
| wild-goose chase | Romeo and Juliet, 1594–96 | 1597 (OED); about 1595 (Merriam-Webster) | Yes | OED, Merriam-Webster |
| foregone conclusion | Othello, 1603–04 | Othello, dated a1616; next example 1823 | Yes | OED (not fully revised) |
The plays are those the crediting sources name; the Shrew line is Tranio's in act 1, scene 2 of the Folger text.
The words now dated earlier
Assassination shows both effects. The OED's 2014 entry begins with a translated title of 1610 and puts Macbeth second, dated from the Folio, though the play was probably written in 1606 or 1607. Merriam-Webster (2016) goes further back, to a letter by Sir Thomas Smith of 11 April 1572. The dictionaries can differ by decades: for uncomfortable, Merriam-Webster quotes a letter of 1534, while the OED's unrevised entry starts in 1592.
The Birthplace Trust's A to Z list makes a fair test. We checked seven of its 26 words: six have earlier evidence in the OED, among them manager from a 1562 translation, zany from George Whetstone in 1582 and critic from John Bridges in 1587. Only lonely still starts with Shakespeare.
Where Shakespeare still comes first
In lonely, foregone conclusion and wild-goose chase. The OED's foregone entry calls the phrase Shakespeare's. Merriam-Webster (2021) traces wild-goose chase to Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio likens a contest of wits to a horse race of that name; Winick (2020) thinks it was already a common phrase, since Chapman used it about ten years later. All three entries are not fully revised: read them as the earliest known use, not a settled verdict.
Which Shakespeare phrases do we still use, and which are older?
Many phrases credited to Shakespeare are older. The best-known list is Bernard Levin's essay "Quoting Shakespeare", from his 1983 book Enthusiasms, which strings together 62 words and phrases; Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress checked several against the OED and the proverb dictionaries (Winick, 2020).
- Dead as a doornail: in the romance William of Palerne in 1350 and in Langland's Piers Plowman in the 1370s (Winick, 2020); the OED's doornail entry also starts in 1350.
- Laughing stock: in John Frith's Another Book Against Rastell, 1533, by the OED's record as Winick reports it.
- In a pickle: Merriam-Webster (2021) lists it as Shakespeare's, from The Tempest; Winick finds "in ill pickle" in Thomas Tusser's Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, 1573.
- Break the ice: Merriam-Webster dates it to about 1577, before the Shrew.
How do you check a "Shakespeare invented" claim yourself?
Check it against the dictionary's own record.
- Find the line and the play, and date the play from a reference work. Writing and printing can be years apart.
- Open the word's OED entry. The factsheet, free to read, gives the earliest evidence; the top of the entry says "Revised" with a year, or "not fully revised".
- Read the dates as the OED does. c means about and a means before; Folio plays carry a1616. Our guide to words that changed meaning shows these conventions at work.
- Check a second dictionary. Merriam-Webster gives a first known use; where it disagrees with the OED, say so.
- Check the sense. The factsheet dates the word's earliest sense, which may not be Shakespeare's; the full quotations need a subscription or library access.
- Find the scholarship with EdCitation's Find sources, build each reference in Cite a source, and cite the OED entry as our OED guide shows.
- Write "the earliest use the OED records", not "invented", and run the list through Verify references.
For the period, see a short history of English; for citing the plays, our MLA guide for English literature.
How do you find and cite research on Shakespeare's vocabulary?
Search the scholarship, then build every reference from its record. EdCitation is the best tool for that second step, because it looks each reference up in the publisher's record and never writes one: on a subject where a confident "Shakespeare invented it" so often proves wrong, a reference built from the record is one you can stand behind. Find sources, Cite a source and Verify references are free with no account; checking every reference in an uploaded paper is part of Pro, at $8 a month (pricing).
We ran Find sources on 2 October 2026. "Shakespeare neologisms" returned 2,436 results, provider OpenAlex, led by Bryan A. Garner's 1987 chapter, listed as "Shakespeare' Latinate Neologisms", then D. Brayton's "Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia" (2012). With Most cited the total stayed 2,436, Brayton's article (63 citations) came first and Garner fifth: the most cited result is not always the most relevant. "Shakespeare vocabulary" returned 21,905, led by Alfred Hart's 1934 article on the vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen, with Hugh Craig's 2011 article seventh.
We gave Craig's DOI to Cite a source. From Crossref's record, with no retraction found, it returned in APA 7:
Craig, H. (2011). Shakespeare’s vocabulary: Myth and reality. Shakespeare Quarterly, 62(1), 53–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2011.0002
and in MLA 9:
Craig, Hugh. “Shakespeare’s Vocabulary: Myth and Reality.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1, 2011, pp. 53–74, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2011.0002.
APA's sentence case keeps Shakespeare's name capital. Cite a source also builds Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE and Vancouver, and screens each source for retraction; Verify references marks every entry verified, "check this" or not found. EdCitation finds, cites and checks sources and never writes any part of your work: the reading and the argument stay entirely yours, on sources you know are real.
Quick questions
How many words did Shakespeare invent?
No one knows. The common 1,700 comes from counts of OED first citations; a search of his contemporaries' books put the words first found in Shakespeare at around 500 (Culpeper & Gillings, 2022).
Did Shakespeare invent the word assassination?
Probably not. Merriam-Webster quotes a 1572 letter by Sir Thomas Smith, and the OED's revised entry starts in 1610, with Macbeth second.
Is wild-goose chase from Shakespeare?
Romeo and Juliet has the earliest known use, about 1595 by Merriam-Webster's dating, though Winick (2020) thinks it was already a common phrase.
Can EdCitation find research on Shakespeare's language?
Yes. EdCitation's free Find sources returned 2,436 results for "Shakespeare neologisms" on 2 October 2026, and Cite a source builds each reference from its DOI.
References
- Battistella, E. (2016, April 10). Shakespeare's linguistic legacy. OUPblog. https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/shakespeare-linguistic-legacy/
- Bevington, D. (2026, September 28). William Shakespeare: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/Chronology-of-Shakespeares-plays
- Brewer, C. (2012). Shakespeare, word-coining and the OED. Shakespeare Survey, 65, 345–357. https://doi.org/10.1017/SSO9781139170000.026
- British Council. (2024, August 1). A closer look at everyday words Shakespeare invented. English Online. https://englishonline.britishcouncil.org/blog/articles/a-closer-look-at-everyday-words-shakespeare-invented/
- Craig, H. (2011). Shakespeare’s vocabulary: Myth and reality. Shakespeare Quarterly, 62(1), 53–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2011.0002
- Culpeper, J., & Gillings, M. (2022, August 31). Five myths about Shakespeare's contribution to the English language. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/five-myths-about-shakespeares-contribution-to-the-english-language-189402
- Merriam-Webster. (2016, May 19). 10 words Shakespeare never invented. Wordplay. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/words-shakespeare-didnt-invent
- Merriam-Webster. (2021, November 23). 10 phrases from Shakespeare. Wordplay. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/top-10-phrases-from-shakespeare
- Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.-a). How do we choose our quotations? Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/information/understanding-entries/how-do-we-choose-our-quotations/
- Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.-b). 'Revised' and 'not fully revised' entries. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/information/understanding-entries/revised-and-not-fully-revised-entries/
- Plescia, I. (2016). The shape of Early Modern English: An interview with Jonathan Culpeper on the Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare's Language project. Memoria di Shakespeare, 3, 1–19. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespearelang/files/2018/01/Shakespeare_3_2016-pp.-1-19_ED.pdf
- Royal Shakespeare Company. (n.d.). Shakespeare's language. https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeare/language/
- Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. (n.d.). Shakespeare's words. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-words/
- Text Creation Partnership. (n.d.). EEBO-TCP: Early English Books Online. https://www.textpartnership.net/pages/eebo-tcp.html
- Winick, S. (2020, April 23). Proverbs, myths, and "the Bard": Are we really "quoting Shakespeare"? Folklife Today, Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2020/04/proverbs-myths-and-the-bard-are-we-really-quoting-shakespeare/