From Shakespeare’s Word & Phrases…

In all of his work – the plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems – Shakespeare uses 17,677 words. Of those 1,700 were first used by Shakespeare. Writers often invent words, either by creating new forms of existing words or coining new words outright, because they are unable to find the exact word they require in the existing language. Shakespeare is the foremost of those. He was by far the most important individual influence on the development of the modern English that we speak today.

Look at this short list of words that we use in our daily speech and ask yourself if you could pass through a day without needing to use at least ten of them. There are many more and you use them without knowing that they were given to you by England’s national writer…

The list includes accommodation, aerial, amazement, apostrophe, castigate, dislocate, dwindle, frugal, generous and inauspicious…

Imagine being Shakespeare’s English teacher…

Later… Quentin asks: “So did Will S actually invent those words, I wonder, or were they in fairly common usage and his is simply the first written record we have?”

Don’t know. But I know a man who does… Stay tuned.