Engineering Shakespeare

Have you ever felt lonely after a lackluster party turnout? What about feeling uncomfortable after a quarrel with someone? Much of the English spoken today, from secure to champion to critic and mimic, can be attributed to William Shakespeare, the poet, author, and playwright of English class infamy (Crystal 2008). Historians often credit him with the introduction or popularization of the most English words compared to anyone else in history, but how did he do it – and did he really invent all these words?

While the Oxford English Dictionary cites Shakespeare as the first recorded user of many standard English words, modern historical linguistics suggests we should view him less as a dictionary writer and more as a recording artist of Elizabethan speech (Brewer 2012). Many words attributed to Shakespeare were likely already circulating in London’s oral slang, and Shakespeare was simply the first one to put it on paper (Crystal 2008). However, where he placed these words – in plays and stories that have been passed down for centuries and performed to an enormous degree – is partly why so many words seem like derivations from his works.

Does this mean Shakespeare was mostly a fraud? No. Many of the words he did invent (about 1,700 of them, according to Crystal (2008)) are still circulating. If they were not describing novel ideas, Shakespeare would often engineer words through three linguistic processes: functional shift, compounding, and affixation (Crystal 2008).

A functional shift is when Shakespeare took a word that was being used as one part of speech and cast it for another. He was especially fond of turning nouns into verbs – take “elbow” and “friend,” two nouns first turned into verbs by him, and still used today (“friend” finding resurgence due to social media). Compounding denoted the practice of placing two words together as a singular concept. Take “eyeball” (combining “eye” and “ball,” as in the ball-shaped nature of the eye) or “lackluster.” He used these words most often for efficiency or to make his iambic pentameter poetic scheme work (Crystal 2008). Finally, affixation attached a prefix or suffix to another word to create a variation of that word. Shakespeare loved the prefix un-, and many of the words he slapped it onto still survive today: take “uncomfortable,” “undress,” “unaware,” and “unreal” as examples.

Unfortunately, not all his words were that popular. For every “addiction” (coined in Othello), there is a “questrist” (in King Lear, describes a person who sets off on a quest), an “armgaunt” (in Antony and Cleopatra, meant “strong-limbed”), or a “squarer” (in Much Ado About Nothing, referred to a quarreler) (Garner 1982). These words most likely fell out of usage because there was never much of a need for them, nor did they carry hidden emotional meanings like some other words did. For example, “lonely” has reason to be used over “solitary,” since the former means something slightly different from the latter and carries a different emotional tone.

Street lingo may have made up many of the words first found in Shakespeare’s work, but it far from discredits his own linguistic genius. Shakespeare proved English’s potential as a freeform modular tool, capable of splicing, joining, and modifying words to make new ones with just as much sense and sensibility. He changed the way we saw language – instead of a static set of rules, we now view our vernacular as a living organism that constantly grows, changes, and evolves through the constant creativity of humans. What a fashionable legacy.

Works Cited

Brewer, C. (2012). Shakespeare, Word-Coining and the OED. Shakespeare Survey, 345–357. https://doi.org/10.1017/sso9781139170000.026

Crystal, D. (2008). “Think on my words” : exploring Shakespeare’s language. Cambridge University Press.

Garner, B. A. (1982). Shakespeare’s Latinate Neologisms. Shakespeare Studies (Columbia), 15, 149.