Probably not, or at least nowhere near that many. Shakespeare almost certainly coined some new words, but being the first person whose use of a word survives in writing is not the same as inventing it, and the famous 1,700 figure says more about how one dictionary was built than about Shakespeare himself.
You have probably seen the claim. It turns up on school posters, in trivia books and across social media, usually with a list of words supposedly invented by Shakespeare: eyeball, assassination, bedazzled, lonely, uncomfortable. I took it at face value for years. When I started checking those lists against the actual research, a surprising number of them fell apart.
Where the number comes from
The figure traces back to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does not claim to know when a word was invented, which is usually impossible to pin down, because words can circulate in speech for years or even centuries before anyone writes them down. Instead it gives dated examples of how each word has been used, starting with the earliest one its editors have found. As linguist Colin Gorrie explains at The Dead Language Society, that is the difference between first use and first attested use, and Shakespeare’s works happen to hold the earliest surviving examples of a very large number of words and meanings. One influential analysis of the dictionary put the total somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000, depending on what you count.
Even that number keeps moving. An Oxford University Press blog post reported that a search of the online OED for Shakespeare as the first quotation returned 1,614 entries, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which still uses the 1,700 figure, describes these as words he is credited with inventing or introducing while acknowledging that lexicographers keep finding earlier examples. The same OUP piece puts the whole thing in perspective: during the years Shakespeare was writing, roughly 1588 to 1612, nearly 8,000 new words entered English. He was one writer in the middle of a much bigger explosion of word-making, not a lone inventor. And fewer than 1.5% of his lines contain a word the OED first cites from him, which is how his audiences managed to follow the plays at all.
Words he gets credit for, and who used them first
Some of the most famous examples have already been found in print before Shakespeare used them. These earlier dates all come from the Dead Language Society’s summary of the research.
| Word | Usually credited to | Found earlier in |
|---|---|---|
| Assassination | Macbeth (c. 1606) | A letter by diplomat Sir Thomas Smith, 1572 |
| Eyeball | The Tempest (c. 1611) | Historian William Patten, 1575 |
| Obscene | Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595) | A translation by scholar Edward Grant, 1571 |
| Uncomfortable | Popular word lists | A letter by George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, 1534 |
| Generous | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Translator Edward Hellowes, 1574 |
| Frugal | Popular word lists | An English translation of Erasmus, 1542 |
Bedazzle, hurry and bold-faced belong on the same list. My favourite is uncomfortable, which was written down three decades before Shakespeare was born.
So why did he collect so many first citations? Mostly because he was the easiest writer to search. The OED was built from the 1850s by hundreds of volunteer readers posting in handwritten quotation slips, long before searchable digital archives existed. Shakespeare had a huge head start: a complete concordance, an index of every word in his works, had been published in 1845, while most of his contemporaries had nothing of the kind. Historian Jonathan Hope’s verdict, quoted in Wikipedia’s list of Shakespearean idioms, is that the Victorian readers read Shakespeare more thoroughly and cited him more often than anyone else, so he gets credit for words that can be found in other writers. He ended up with around 33,000 quotations in the first edition of the dictionary.
When researchers check other authors with the same care, Shakespeare’s lead shrinks fast. In 1980, German scholar Jürgen Schäfer went through the works of one contemporary, Thomas Nashe, and found more than fifty words where Nashe got there first. In one sample of 117 words once credited to Shakespeare, the OED’s revisers have since found earlier examples for 57. As more early texts are digitised, words like assassination and puke, as one writer notes, keep turning up earlier.
Then there is everything that has been lost. Of roughly 3,000 plays written for London’s public theatres between 1567 and 1642, only about 543 survive, and the cheap pamphlets, ballads and personal letters where everyday English really lived have almost entirely vanished. The earliest surviving quotation gives us a documented starting point, not necessarily the true beginning.
What is still his
None of this makes Shakespeare less remarkable. He wrote around 880,000 words of plays and poems and experimented constantly, building new words with prefixes and suffixes (the OUP piece points to uneducated and swaggerer), turning nouns into verbs and joining words together. Some words linked to him may well be genuine inventions; laughable still seems to be one. Others were probably already in circulation and became familiar, or took on new meanings, because he put them on the stage. The frustrating, fascinating part is that we often cannot tell which is which.
I find that version of the story more satisfying than the poster. A lone genius inventing 1,700 words is a neat legend, but the real picture is a whole city of writers, translators and ordinary people coining words at a furious pace, with one of them lucky enough to have his work survive, be indexed and be read more closely than anyone else’s. It is also a good reminder, for me as much as anyone, to ask where a “fun fact” number actually comes from. If the history of English has you curious, I have also written about why J was the last letter added to the alphabet and the letters that disappeared from the alphabet.