Shakespeare’s gargantuan vocabulary

Shakespeare uses more words (20,500) than his contemporaries Jonson (19,000) and Middleton (14,000). But these figures can be misleading. He simply wrote more. If one considers the rate at which he uses words he has not used before, he is strictly average. Shakespeare is also believed to have invented more words than almost anyone else. Another misapprehension. Since Jürgen Schäfer’s work in the 1980s we know that Shakespeare’s apparent creativity has to be treated with caution. Shakespeare’s works have simply been searched much more carefully than those of other writers, especially by the army of readers who worked for the OED. In fact, Marvin Spevack has suggested that Shakespeare avoids one of the main sources of new words – Latin, using up to 50% fewer Latin-derived words than the average of his contemporaries. Shakespeare’s preference seems to have been to extend the meaning of words rather than create entirely new ones. Shakespeare also shows a tendency for unusual word order, seeming to prefer SOV over SVO, and increasingly so over his career and far in excess of his contemporaries. When he uses SOV in longer sentences, the reader may actually find it harder to follow: What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,/That thou so many princes at a shot/So bloodily hast struck? (Hope, Jonathan: “Shakespeare and the English Language”, in: Beal, Joan: “A national language”, in: Seargeant, Philip & Swann, Joan (ed.): English in the World. History, Diversity, Change. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012: 81.)