The Bard of Avon has put a whole lot of words in our mouths that we don’t realise

If you’ve ever said you’ve been on a wild goose chase, or tried to break the ice, or worn your heart on your sleeve, you’ve been quoting Shakespeare, perhaps without being aware of it.

Shakespearewallas have surmised that the Elizabethan poet and playwright introduced over 1,700 words and phrases into the English language, many of which are in common use today, spoken by people who might never have read a single word of the Bard of Avon.

The dramatist coined words by turning nouns into verbs, and vice versa, verbs into adjectives, adding prefixes and suffixes or inventing completely new words, such as ‘puking’, in As You Like It: “At first the infant/Mewling and puking in its nurse’s arms.”

Shakespeareisms, to emulate the writer in word coinage, include from A in ‘amazement’, through B in ‘birthplace’, to W in ‘watchdog’ and ‘well-read’, as the Bard undoubtedly was.

According to language analysts, Shakespeare used over 31,500 words in his entire corpus. Extrapolating from this, he probably had a vocabulary of over 66,000 words, as compared with an average English speaker of today who knows between 10,000 and 20,000 words, depending on level of education.

Considering that advances in science, technology and commercial activity on a global scale have enlarged the English language to some 273,000 words, a number much larger than the vocabulary of Elizabethan times, Shakespeare’s word-power was incredibly prodigious.

Shakespeare’s surviving works include 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and several other poems. Besides writing, he also acted in at least four of his own plays, including Macbeth, As You Like It, Henry IV, and Hamlet. This hectic schedule, dictated by financial necessity, compelled him to write at breakneck speed, often completing a playscript in a couple of days. The furious pace possibly spurred his verbal inventiveness, conjuring a legacy of words and phrases which he has bequeathed to us.

A legacy which we know “in our heart of hearts” (Hamlet)will not “vanish into thin air” (Othello)in “one fell swoop” (Macbeth), but will “come full circle” (King Lear), never being “too much of a good thing” (As You Like It).

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