After the Bible and The Times newspaper, William Shakespeare is the third most quoted source in the entire Oxford English Dictionary (OED), with his works providing almost twice as many citations as the next most-quoted author, Sir Walter Scott, and more than three times as many as Charles Dickens. Shakespeare accounts for just over 33,000 references in the OED (5 per cent of which are from Hamlet alone) of which some 1,500 provide the first recorded use of a word in the English language, and a further 8,000 provide the first record of an existing word being used in a new sense or context. Although it cannot be said that Shakespeare personally created all of these new words and senses (his works merely provide their first written evidence), nonetheless his linguistic creativity is clear.
Listed here are the stories behind ten Shakespearean coinages, from words as deceptively modern as ADVERTISING and WATCHDOG, to more bookish terms like BOSKY and LACKLUSTRE. His use of ELBOW in King Lear, meanwhile, is a prime example of his inventive adaptation of a preexisting English word.
Admittedly, Shakespeare’s use of the word advertising – ‘as I was then / Advertising and holy to your business / . . . I am still / Attorney’d at your service’ (Measure for Measure, V. i) – does not bear the same sense of the word we use today, but instead points to a much earlier use of the verb advertise, dating from the fifteenth century, to mean to ‘warn’ or ‘call attention to’ or ‘take notice of’; Shakespeare’s advertising is in fact an adjective, essentially meaning ‘watchful’ or ‘attentive’. Derived from an Old French verb avertir meaning ‘to become aware of’, this early meaning of advertise gradually developed to come to mean ‘make known’ or ‘give public notice’, from where the modern sense of the word implying commercial promotion or publicity eventually derived in the eighteenth century.
As an adjective, the first recorded use of the word amazing in English is recorded in Shakespeare’s Richard II (I. iii), in which John of Gaunt rousingly exclaims ‘And let thy blows . . . / Fall like amazing thunder on the casque / Of thy adverse pernicious enemy’. Thought to be derived from some unknown Old English word, mase or maze, meaning ‘confusion’ or ‘delirium’, the word amazing originally meant ‘terrifying’ or ‘dreadful’ and was used to describe anything that stupefies or overwhelms. It was not until the eighteenth century that it began to apply to anything astounding or wondrous, the sense by which it is most often used today.
Fittingly, the word assassination was first used in English in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (I. vii), in a soliloquy delivered by Macbeth himself in which he mulls over the proposed murder of King Duncan and its aftermath: ‘If the assassination / Could trammel up the consequence, and catch / With his surcease success; that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all here’. The word is formed around the earlier assassin, first recorded in English in the early 1500s, which is itself thought to be descended from an Arabic word meaning ‘hashish-eaters’, hashishin, once used for members of a radical Muslim sect known for intoxicating themselves with hashish before carrying out the murders of rival leaders or public figures.
First recorded in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I. ii) – ‘Some of your French crowns have no hair at all, and then you will play bare-faced’ – the earliest use of the word barefaced in English was a literal one, meaning simply ‘unmasked’ or ‘with the face uncovered’. Also used in both Hamlet (IV. v) and Macbeth (III. i), the word gained its broader and more familiar use, meaning ‘audacious’ or ‘impudent’, in the eighteenth century, the sense by which it appears in Dickens’s Oliver Twist: ‘Of all the artful and designing orphans . . . you are one of the most bare-facedest’.
The odd word bosky was first recorded in Shakespeare’s The Tempest – ‘My bosky acres and my unshrubbed down’ (Iv. i) – where it is used to mean ‘bushy’ or ‘covered in vegetation’. It is derived from the Old English dialect word bosk, referring to a bush or thicket, with the addition of the suffix -y to form an adjective. Other words Shakespeare coined in this way include doughy (in All’s Well That Ends Well, IV. v), leaky (The Tempest, I. i, and Antony and Cleopatra, III. xiii), beachy, in the sense of ‘covered by a beach’ (Henry IV, Part 2, III. i), barky, meaning ‘bark-covered’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV. i), and shelvy, meaning ‘of different levels’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, III. v).
The adjective dauntless was first recorded in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3 (III. iii) – ‘Let thy dauntless mind still ride in triumph, over all mischance’. Formed from the earlier verb daunt, adapted from the Old French danter meaning ‘to subdue’ or ‘to tame’, the word is one of a number of familiar adjectives featuring the suffix -less that were first recorded in Shakespeare’s works: countless is used in his 1593 poem Venus and Adonis; airless is found in the opening act of Julius Caesar (I. iii); noiseless was first used in King Lear (IV. ii) and reappeared in All’s Well that Ends Well (V. iii); and priceless was used in his epic poem The Rape of Lucrece: ‘What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent / In the possession of his beauteous mate’.
To say that Shakespeare himself coined the word elbow is incorrect, as the word was already several centuries old before his time. What Shakespeare is responsible for, however – as is the case with several words to which he is attributed – is the adaption of the noun elbow into a verb, meaning to ‘nudge’ or ‘jostle out of the way’; the term appears in King Lear (IV. iii), in the phrase ‘A sovereign shame so elbows him’. Amongst the many other nouns Shakespeare similarly transformed into verbs are cake, hinge, lapse, cater, torture, choir, attorney, cudgel, bet, sire, canopy and rival.
The word lacklustre first appeared in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (II. vii), in which the melancholy Jacques recalls a meeting in the forest with Touchstone, the clown, who ‘drew a dial from his poke, / And, looking on it with lacklustre eye, / Says very wisely, “It is ten o’clock”’. This same speech is also the origin of the phrase ‘and thereby hangs a tale’, whilst the well-known expressions ‘too much of a good thing’ (IV. i), ‘neither rhyme nor reason’ (III. ii), ‘forever and a day’ (IV. i) and ‘laid on with a trowel’ (I. ii) have all been taken from As You Like It.
Shakespeare coined the unusual verb unsex for use in Macbeth (I. v), in which Lady Macbeth exclaims, ‘Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe full / Of direst cruelty’, pleading that she may have her feminine attributes removed so that she would be able to carry out the masculine act of murder. The word essentially means to ‘remove the sexual characteristics of someone’, but it could also be taken to mean to ‘disguise’ or ‘hide the characteristics of’, and has since been used more figuratively by other writers to mean to ‘distort’ or ‘make ugly’. Other un- verbs coined by Shakespeare include uncheck (Timon of Athens, IV. iii), unhand (Hamlet, I. iv), unbless (Sonnet 3), unbuild (Coriolanus, III. i) and unfair, used Sonnet 5 to mean ‘remove the fairness (beauty) of’.
Watchdog was first recorded in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (I. ii): ‘Hark, hark . . . The watch-dogs bark’. A straightforward compound of watch and dog, the word is one of a number of compounds Shakespeare coined for his plays, many of which are still used today: chimney-top (Julius Caesar, I. i), birthplace (Coriolanus, IV. iv), footfall (The Tempest, II. ii), both upstairs and downstairs (Henry IV, Part 1, II. v), water-drops (Richard II, IV. i), shooting star (Richard II, II. iv), eyeball (from the poem Venus and Adonis), hunchbacked (Richard III, IV. iv), fairyland (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. i) and puppy-dog (King John, II. i).