How many words did we get from shakespeare himself
Executive summary
The best-supported answers say Shakespeare is credited with introducing somewhere between roughly 1,700 and nearly 3,000 words to English, but that figure is a shorthand for “earliest recorded use in his works,” not definitive proof he invented every item; scholars warn the true number is uncertain and often overstated [1] [2] [3].
1. What people usually mean by “words we got from Shakespeare”
When journalists and educators state that Shakespeare “added” thousands of words they most often mean the Oxford English Dictionary (and other lexical historians) cite Shakespeare’s works as the earliest surviving written instance of many forms and senses, a practice that has produced headline numbers like “almost 3,000” words attributed to him [2]; other summaries and classroom materials give smaller rounded totals such as “about 1,700” words, reflecting different counting and attribution methods [1].
2. The headline counts: why 1,700 and why 3,000 appear in different accounts
Estimates crop up because different compilers use different criteria: one method counts only clear neologisms (words demonstrably first attested in his texts), producing lower figures sometimes cited around 1,700, while broader tallies that include new senses, uses, and compounds first recorded in Shakespeare can push totals toward several thousand — the “almost 3,000” figure often cited in popular treatments reflects that broader approach [1] [2] [4].
3. Methodological caution: earliest attestation is not authorship
Scholars caution that “credited with” does not equal “coined by”; the Conversation piece explicitly warns that even if every word in Shakespeare’s corpus were his own coinages that would still represent only a small fraction of modern English and that many words he’s linked with may have been in spoken or now-lost written use before his surviving texts were printed [3]. Lexicographers record the first known textual appearance, which privileges survival of documents and editorial decisions as much as origin [3] [2].
4. Larger context: Shakespeare’s lexical footprint versus total language size
Estimates of Shakespeare’s personal vocabulary range widely — some sources give figures of roughly 24,000 words (or up to 28,000) used across his plays and poems — which helps explain why many distinct forms show up first in his writings, but that scale still represents a modest slice of the living language over centuries [5]. Authorities also highlight Shakespeare’s stylistic role in standardizing Early Modern English spelling and usage even when he didn’t invent individual items [6] [7].
5. Why the popular myth persists and how to read the numbers
The appealing story — “Shakespeare invented thousands of words” — is easy to summarize and teaches the Bard’s linguistic importance, but it obscures messy facts: lexicographical practices, textual survival, and the difference between first attestation and true coinage all inflate tidy claims [3] [2]. Popular blogs and education sites amplify round numbers (1,700; 3,000; “several thousands”) without always flagging the caveats, so readers should treat single-number headlines as shorthand rather than precise attribution [4] [1].
6. Bottom line: how many words did we get from Shakespeare himself
The defensible, evidence-based answer is that scholarship credits Shakespeare’s works with the earliest known appearances of roughly 1,700 to nearly 3,000 English words or senses, but that this reflects documentary first-recording rather than incontrovertible invention by Shakespeare himself; the exact number cannot be fixed from surviving sources and depends on definitional choices about what counts as a “word from Shakespeare” [1] [2] [3].