What words by shakespeare do we still use today
Executive summary
Shakespeare's texts supply the first recorded use of many English words and helped normalize countless phrases that remain in everyday speech; scholars estimate he introduced or popularized roughly 1,700 words drawn from a vocabulary of over 20,000 [1]. While popular lists name items like "addiction," "bedazzled," "assassination," and idioms such as "in a pickle" and "with bated breath," experts caution that attribution sometimes reflects citation bias rather than incontrovertible invention [2] [3].
1. Shakespeare's lexical footprint: the raw numbers
Reference works affiliated with Shakespeare scholarship report that he used more than 20,000 words across his plays and poems and that his works provide the earliest recorded instances for over 1,700 entries in English dictionaries—figures that underpin claims about his linguistic legacy [1].
2. Everyday single words traced to his pages
Multiple education and language outlets compile lists of individual words still current today and widely attributed to Shakespeare, including "addiction" (used in Henry V), "bedazzled" (The Taming of the Shrew), "critic" in its modern sense (Love's Labour's Lost), and emotionally charged terms like "uncomfortable" and "assassination" that appear in his plays or are derived from his manipulations of existing roots [2] [4] [5].
3. Idioms and phrases the culture still repeats
Beyond isolated words, Shakespeare popularized idioms that have entered everyday English: "to be cruel to be kind," "a heart of gold," "all that glitters is not gold" (rendered in modern form), "in a pickle," "with bated breath," and "a wild goose chase" are repeatedly listed by cultural and teaching institutions as phrases originating in his plays and surviving into modern parlance [6] [7] [3] [8].
4. The scholarly debate: coined vs. popularised
Lexicographers and historians urge nuance: while many dictionaries and cultural sites credit Shakespeare with "first use," recent scholarship argues that Victorian editors and OED compilers favored Shakespeare as a source, which can make him appear to have invented terms that may already have existed in speech or less-preserved texts; digital textual surveys have reduced some of that over-claiming by finding earlier instances or showing Shakespeare popularized rather than originated certain words [9] [3].
5. How and why words stuck
Shakespeare’s dramatic needs—coining verbs from nouns, attaching prefixes and suffixes, and stretching meanings for poetic effect—created memorable turns of phrase and flexible verbs that ordinary speech could adopt; contemporary language educators and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust point to his creative processes (compounding, conversion, affixation) as reasons many coinages survived into modern usage [1] [10] [2].
6. What remains uncertain and why caution matters
Claims that Shakespeare "invented" everyday English should be read alongside methodological caveats: historians note that more thorough reading of other early texts sometimes reveals earlier uses, and that Shakespeare’s prominence in printing and scholarship amplified his citations in early dictionaries—so the list of words he "invented" is partly a function of surviving documentation and editorial attention [3] [9].
7. Practical takeaway for readers and learners
For language learners and readers, the practical fact is simple: many common words and idioms encountered in classrooms and media trace to Shakespeare's plays or were fixed in usage because of them, and resources from the British Council, Shakespeare trusts, and academic glossaries provide concrete examples and contexts for these surviving items [6] [7] [11].