Shakespeare’s New Words

In the Elizabethan era many new words came into English, 26,947 between 1500 and 1659, particularly based on Latin. Around 700 of these are found for the first time in the writings of Shakespeare. It may be accidental that many of these crop up in Shakespeare; obviously he was reflecting the language around him and could not use too many new words without losing his audience. Nevertheless their sheer number does suggest that some must have been his own coinage, particularly as many use Latin forms in an un‑Latin way – according to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’. Here are some of those that have come down to us today, though not necessarily with the same meaning.