Day 18: More Shakespeare

I've already expressed some of my opinions on William Shakespeare, but let us not forget that -- in addition to being perhaps the world's most famous author -- he probably added more to the English language than any other individual. Around 1700 words were first recorded in Shakespeare's literature.

You probably know that Shakespeare came up with the now-clichéd phrases "all's well that ends well" (from the play of the same name), "the green-eyed monster" (Othello), and "it was Greek to me" (Julius Caesar). However, there are many other everyday phrases which, as far as anyone can tell, originated in Shakespeare's writing:"wear my heart upon my sleeve", "in my heart of hearts", "neither rhyme nor reason", "faint-hearted", and "love is blind" all sound Shakespearian; but what about "break the ice", "eaten me out of house and home", "truth will out", and "dead as a doornail"? Many of Shakespeare's phrases seem far too modern, so that we can't imagine him having used them back in the 1500s or 1600s. One of my favourite phrases of Shakespeare invention is "in a pickle", as it sounds so far from the language we imagine him using.

As for single words Shakespeare made up, "epileptic", "puking" and "alligator" were all his words. The first two have synonyms, but it's strange to think that alligators used to be called something else, or perhaps they had no name at all -- and stranger to think that Shakespeare took it upon himself to give them a new name. Unbelievably, Shakespeare even invented the word "eyeball", which I can’t believe no one had thought of before In addition to this, he created the words "addiction", "amazement", "premeditated," "varied", "Dalmatians", "apostrophe", "elbow", "moonbeam", and "impartial", among many others.

We owe a lot of our language to William Shakespeare, who made up around 10% of the words he ever used and succeeded in adding most of them to common usage. I'll leave you with a final, fabulous bit of trivia: the first recorded use of the word "swagger" was in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. He literally invented swag.