Martin’s Blog

When I was in Year 11 we were studying a Shakespeare play and we saw a video that somewhere along the way claimed that Shakespeare had invented many words of the English language, including the word ‘bubble’*.

* I don’t remember the video, so the claim could just have been in class discussion. I can’t find any serious resource that says that it’s true but it’s the kind of thing people say on random forums** as this google search shows.

** I much prefer the pluralisation ‘forums’ to ‘fora’.

I didn’t believe it (if he invented the word how did people know what he meant?) but I’d never bothered to find out if it was true or not until now. A simple check of the OED (may require university subscription) showed that Caxton wrote “The water of those wellis sprynge vp with grete bobles” in 1481, well before Shakespeare’s birth in 1564.

Wikipedia, as usual, has a sensible answer to the question of how many words Shakespeare invented*. Nobody knows. The reason that people think he coined so many words is that the OED used his works as the citations for many words. But clearly this is no evidence at all – obviously they would have used one of the most famous English language writers as a source.

*The fact that the word ‘invented’ is used to describe the words that Shakespeare coined is part of the problem. If the phrase ‘introduced to the English language’ was used instead my younger self would have been less flabbergasted. The phrase ‘invented’ to me means that he made the word up entirely, rather than just adding a suffix to assassin to make assassination or putting eye and ball together to make eyeball – two examples of words Shakespeare was the first to use.

This page claims 1700 words and gives a moderately sized list of them. Some quick searching shows that Shakespeare is often the first recorded to use a word in a particular sense or to add a prefix or suffix but there really isn’t a whole lot of invention going on in this list.