“Shakespeare is credited by the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary with being the first user of about 3,200 words.” Alfred Hart, 1942
Shakespeare scholars now believe that Hart’s estimate is probably too high. Many of these words were likely in circulation but not found in the sources then used by the OUP.
But when it comes to producing a more realistic figure, scholarly calculations vary greatly.
A British Council website from 2016 suggests ‘more than two thousand’. The Online Shakespeare Biography goes with ‘around 1200’. The OUP, for its part, has calibrated its original 3,200 ‘earliest citations’ with a more tentative claim for ‘over 1600’.
Linguistics Professor Jonathan Culpeper, from the University of Lancaster, gives the lowest number of all the estimates in his The Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language. This is a computer-based analysis of everything Shakespeare is known to have written.
Culpeper suggests that “recorded somewhere in the order of 400 new words.”
Just 400? Perhaps the Bard is not the lexical Big Dog after all?
Professor Culpeper reminds us that this is still an astounding number for a single author. The closest competitor is Charles Dickens with 265 ‘first entries’ while “modern writers are lucky if they’ve invented one word.”
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