This was great. I was always skeptical of those claims because it seemed like it would be hard for the audience to understand his plays if so many of the words were brand new to them. I loved reading the details about the OED. And that concordance. That had to be quite the labor of love.
That occurred to me, too, but then I saw that one example was “assassination” where “assassinate” was already previously attested; an audience would surely have understood that even if it were new to them. I don’t know how many of the allegedly “new” words are obvious mechanical extensions as opposed to what we might call clever coinages.
Fantastic piece! Have you ever seen Upstart Crow? This forms the basis for one of the recurring gags in it (Will hears a word or phrase and says, "That's one of mine, isn't it?" and his companions all groan and say, no, people were saying that before you were born).
It occurs to me that what you say about the accessibility of texts to searching is still true today, despite digitization. A great many old books are well-known enough to have been fully digitized, i.e. put into text form, so that searching through them using a computer is very simple. But many more that have survived have not been put into searchable text, a task which requires a human to proofread all of that text (or perhaps did until recently -- I don't know whether AI can do this entirely consistently yet); if they have been digitized (by Google Books or the Internet Archive or some country's National Library, to name a few useful online sources of digitized books), it is in the form of images of each page, sometimes with an automated OCR text version attached, so that if you try to search through them for some word, many usages of the word may be obscured by typos & mixed with automatically misread false positives. (I recently tried to find out when the hypercorrect medieval Latin diminutive 'agrellus' was in use, & had to sort through many more misreadings of 'agreſtis' than actual examples.) That is only for books old enough to be out of copyright -- books published in the last century are much more likely to have been digitized, but you will have to pay the publisher to access them.
This task should be easier with dead languages, whose corpora are small & well-studied, but at least for Latin & Ancient Greek, the searchable online corpora I am aware of (principally www.perseus.tufts.edu & latin.packhum.edu ) include all of the canonical authors but often omit some technical texts (on grammar &, in Greek, medicine), various fragments, papyri & inscriptions, & many late-antique authors. (Do you know of any online corpus of Ancient Greek texts which is more complete in these respects?)
An excellent article! I have found the same problem with names Shakespeare supposedly created, such as "Olivia." Once the excitement from finding out that Shakespeare had created my name died down I realized that I had come upon the name in much earlier texts, and thus couldn't possibly be a coinage of Shakespeare!
Thanks, I never understood how he could’ve invented so many words when the plays were meant to be understood to a paying audience. It makes sense that to the extent he did coin words, it would be words that would be discernible in context and wouldn’t confuse audiences as the plays were performed. “Laughable” and “lonely” are good examples. You can understand what those mean in context, even if you never heard the words.
I wonder how much of an issue this is in other languages. Take Italian, for instance. From what I can tell, the works of Dante Alighieri are acknowledged to be very important in its development as a written language separate from Latin. What about less famous transitionary writings made at the same time or earlier, though? Maybe there are new discoveries to be had in letter stored away at dusty archives. Hopefully improving OCR will allow scholars to shed some light here.
Maybe it is not as much of an issue as in the Shakespeare case because Dante didn't have as many contemporaries writing in the same language.
dante alighieri immediately came to my mind while i was reading this article. he's credited with a lot of neologisms and idioms, but reading this article, for the first time, i questioned this aspect. as the article pointed out, it's easier and more charming to attribute the creation of a piece of modern language to a single genius individual. but the reality is likely to be a lot more complicated than this.
I'm so glad you wrote this because I time I see claims about how many words Shakespeare invented, I think:
1 how much writing has survived from that period? It's not surprising he'd be the first recorded use seeing as we have all (?) his work. I hadn't thought of the Great Fire of London - good point. And the Civil War was destructive too. You could factor in the Blitz as well - things like the Paston Letters and "The Book of Margery Kemp" were found in attics. If a house was bombed, anything ancient stashed up there would've been lost!
2 if he invented 2,000 words, how would his audience have understood his plays and sonnets?!
By the way... I wonder about the different sources used for deciding earliest use. There are so many wills and parish registers which could contain first recorded usages but unless you're a linguist, it might not occur to you that you've just found a first usage. Manorial records, church courts, etc... you might even get lucky and find a very old letter between the pages!
Lovely explanation! Raises a related thought for me: these days neologisms seem to be more tolerated in academic writing, and I wonder if that is because there's some vague assumption that precision is somehow more necessary there? I write fiction, and put a lot of thought into connotation, denotation, and nuance--the search for the perfect word often ends up in areas beyond the streetlight. Many times, I've reached for a word form that ought to exist (or used to) and it gets edited right out by the conformity enforcers. Unfamiliar, obsolete, and rare words all raise an eyebrow. So coining a word has considerable appeal, but beyond the much-cited "cromulent" I can't think of many examples from recent fiction. Am I just missing them?
I was thinking along similar lines - I write commercial fiction and editors won't allow any invented words, or unusual ones. Goodbye, "verandah" and "staccato"!
I don't know why readers can't look a word up if they don't recognise it, but I suppose publishers want to avoid the risk of bad reviews from people annoyed by words they're not used to.
I'm sure literary writers have more space for unusual words or new coinages, but even so, if the books aren't widely read or aren't picked for a literary prize, the words won't reach many people.
Interesting to hear that perspective - makes me sad. If even "verandah" is considered too much, I guess I can be pretty sure my writing will have a limited audience. Encountering unfamiliar words is part of the joy of language for me, and when I can integrate a new one into my working vocabulary, I always feel a little bit richer.
What about not creating new words exactly, but radically redeploying them ? I cringe at the modern phenomenon of turning nouns or phrases into pompous verbs, eg "We need to dialogue about this", "we need to onboard those concerns". But what about this conspicuous example of turning a resolutely intransitive verb into a transitive one, from Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot":
I came across this claim as an interesting fact when I was doing research for my own newsletter and never thought about it twice but yeah, this makes way more sense. I’m glad I never shared it as one of my random facts lol
Successful coinages are cool, but I find wide and fresh vocabularies much more impressive and exciting. It means the person was talking with many interesting people, and reading widely and with curiosity.
>Work began in the late 1850s on a project with enormous ambitions: to document every English word ever coined, with dated quotations tracing how every single one had been used across the centuries.
>To gather these quotations, the editors recruited hundreds of volunteer readers who combed through texts and mailed in millions of handwritten slips, each recording a word, its context, and the source they had taken it from.
Like an early Wiki?
>This is survivorship bias. Our conclusions are drawn from what survived, and we’re blind to everything that didn’t.
I love your work! I wonder if you are familiar with Shakespeare's Beehive? If you are you do not seem to have written about it. IF you are not, I think you might find it quite exciting. https://shakespearesbeehive.com
This was great. I was always skeptical of those claims because it seemed like it would be hard for the audience to understand his plays if so many of the words were brand new to them. I loved reading the details about the OED. And that concordance. That had to be quite the labor of love.
That occurred to me, too, but then I saw that one example was “assassination” where “assassinate” was already previously attested; an audience would surely have understood that even if it were new to them. I don’t know how many of the allegedly “new” words are obvious mechanical extensions as opposed to what we might call clever coinages.
Fantastic piece! Have you ever seen Upstart Crow? This forms the basis for one of the recurring gags in it (Will hears a word or phrase and says, "That's one of mine, isn't it?" and his companions all groan and say, no, people were saying that before you were born).
It occurs to me that what you say about the accessibility of texts to searching is still true today, despite digitization. A great many old books are well-known enough to have been fully digitized, i.e. put into text form, so that searching through them using a computer is very simple. But many more that have survived have not been put into searchable text, a task which requires a human to proofread all of that text (or perhaps did until recently -- I don't know whether AI can do this entirely consistently yet); if they have been digitized (by Google Books or the Internet Archive or some country's National Library, to name a few useful online sources of digitized books), it is in the form of images of each page, sometimes with an automated OCR text version attached, so that if you try to search through them for some word, many usages of the word may be obscured by typos & mixed with automatically misread false positives. (I recently tried to find out when the hypercorrect medieval Latin diminutive 'agrellus' was in use, & had to sort through many more misreadings of 'agreſtis' than actual examples.) That is only for books old enough to be out of copyright -- books published in the last century are much more likely to have been digitized, but you will have to pay the publisher to access them.
This task should be easier with dead languages, whose corpora are small & well-studied, but at least for Latin & Ancient Greek, the searchable online corpora I am aware of (principally www.perseus.tufts.edu & latin.packhum.edu ) include all of the canonical authors but often omit some technical texts (on grammar &, in Greek, medicine), various fragments, papyri & inscriptions, & many late-antique authors. (Do you know of any online corpus of Ancient Greek texts which is more complete in these respects?)
> many usages of the word may be obscured by typos & mixed with automatically misread false positives.
Not just false positives! My latest issue is with a book that interpreted all á's as d's.
An excellent article! I have found the same problem with names Shakespeare supposedly created, such as "Olivia." Once the excitement from finding out that Shakespeare had created my name died down I realized that I had come upon the name in much earlier texts, and thus couldn't possibly be a coinage of Shakespeare!
Thanks, I never understood how he could’ve invented so many words when the plays were meant to be understood to a paying audience. It makes sense that to the extent he did coin words, it would be words that would be discernible in context and wouldn’t confuse audiences as the plays were performed. “Laughable” and “lonely” are good examples. You can understand what those mean in context, even if you never heard the words.
I wonder how much of an issue this is in other languages. Take Italian, for instance. From what I can tell, the works of Dante Alighieri are acknowledged to be very important in its development as a written language separate from Latin. What about less famous transitionary writings made at the same time or earlier, though? Maybe there are new discoveries to be had in letter stored away at dusty archives. Hopefully improving OCR will allow scholars to shed some light here.
Maybe it is not as much of an issue as in the Shakespeare case because Dante didn't have as many contemporaries writing in the same language.
dante alighieri immediately came to my mind while i was reading this article. he's credited with a lot of neologisms and idioms, but reading this article, for the first time, i questioned this aspect. as the article pointed out, it's easier and more charming to attribute the creation of a piece of modern language to a single genius individual. but the reality is likely to be a lot more complicated than this.
I'm so glad you wrote this because I time I see claims about how many words Shakespeare invented, I think:
1 how much writing has survived from that period? It's not surprising he'd be the first recorded use seeing as we have all (?) his work. I hadn't thought of the Great Fire of London - good point. And the Civil War was destructive too. You could factor in the Blitz as well - things like the Paston Letters and "The Book of Margery Kemp" were found in attics. If a house was bombed, anything ancient stashed up there would've been lost!
2 if he invented 2,000 words, how would his audience have understood his plays and sonnets?!
By the way... I wonder about the different sources used for deciding earliest use. There are so many wills and parish registers which could contain first recorded usages but unless you're a linguist, it might not occur to you that you've just found a first usage. Manorial records, church courts, etc... you might even get lucky and find a very old letter between the pages!
Lovely explanation! Raises a related thought for me: these days neologisms seem to be more tolerated in academic writing, and I wonder if that is because there's some vague assumption that precision is somehow more necessary there? I write fiction, and put a lot of thought into connotation, denotation, and nuance--the search for the perfect word often ends up in areas beyond the streetlight. Many times, I've reached for a word form that ought to exist (or used to) and it gets edited right out by the conformity enforcers. Unfamiliar, obsolete, and rare words all raise an eyebrow. So coining a word has considerable appeal, but beyond the much-cited "cromulent" I can't think of many examples from recent fiction. Am I just missing them?
I was thinking along similar lines - I write commercial fiction and editors won't allow any invented words, or unusual ones. Goodbye, "verandah" and "staccato"!
I don't know why readers can't look a word up if they don't recognise it, but I suppose publishers want to avoid the risk of bad reviews from people annoyed by words they're not used to.
I'm sure literary writers have more space for unusual words or new coinages, but even so, if the books aren't widely read or aren't picked for a literary prize, the words won't reach many people.
Interesting to hear that perspective - makes me sad. If even "verandah" is considered too much, I guess I can be pretty sure my writing will have a limited audience. Encountering unfamiliar words is part of the joy of language for me, and when I can integrate a new one into my working vocabulary, I always feel a little bit richer.
What about not creating new words exactly, but radically redeploying them ? I cringe at the modern phenomenon of turning nouns or phrases into pompous verbs, eg "We need to dialogue about this", "we need to onboard those concerns". But what about this conspicuous example of turning a resolutely intransitive verb into a transitive one, from Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot":
"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike"
"hesitate dislike". How utterly brilliant!
I came across this claim as an interesting fact when I was doing research for my own newsletter and never thought about it twice but yeah, this makes way more sense. I’m glad I never shared it as one of my random facts lol
Successful coinages are cool, but I find wide and fresh vocabularies much more impressive and exciting. It means the person was talking with many interesting people, and reading widely and with curiosity.
>Work began in the late 1850s on a project with enormous ambitions: to document every English word ever coined, with dated quotations tracing how every single one had been used across the centuries.
>To gather these quotations, the editors recruited hundreds of volunteer readers who combed through texts and mailed in millions of handwritten slips, each recording a word, its context, and the source they had taken it from.
Like an early Wiki?
>This is survivorship bias. Our conclusions are drawn from what survived, and we’re blind to everything that didn’t.
Ah, the biplane with chickenpox strikes again!
HA! I knew it! This was wonderful, thank you so very much.
I love your work! I wonder if you are familiar with Shakespeare's Beehive? If you are you do not seem to have written about it. IF you are not, I think you might find it quite exciting. https://shakespearesbeehive.com