How many words did shakespeare create
Executive summary
William Shakespeare is widely credited with introducing hundreds to thousands of English words into print, but the exact count depends on what "created" means: authoritative sources and projects cite figures ranging from about 594 distinct coinages to roughly 1,700 first-known appearances in his works, while commentators stress that many of those words may have been current in speech before he wrote them down [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. The headline numbers — where 1,700 comes from and what it means
The oft-repeated figure that Shakespeare “invented” 1,700 words comes from counts of words whose earliest surviving citation appears in texts attributed to him and is endorsed in popular summaries by institutions and reference sites [2] [4] [3], and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tradition of dating first recorded usages supports many such attributions [3]; however, “first known in print” is not the same as proof of literal invention.
2. A stricter count — the 594‑word project and why it’s lower
A rigorous volunteer project that excluded compound forms and ambiguous cases produced a master list tallying 594 individual words whose earliest appearance is reliably traced to Shakespeare’s works, explicitly rejecting the casual spread of the 1,700 figure and warning that many alleged attributions are unsupported by primary-source verification [1] [5].
3. The OED, methodology, and the difference between “introduced” and “coined”
Reference works like the OED aim to identify earliest recorded usages, which leads to many Shakespeare entries being flagged as the first surviving print occurrence; scholars and editors caution that this documents introduction into the written record rather than incontrovertible coinage, because oral use, lost texts, or dialectal variants could pre‑date the printed example [3] [6].
4. Why counts vary — compounds, prefixes, meanings and later discoveries
Disagreement stems from methodological choices: whether to count compounds and hyphenations, whether adding a prefix (e.g., un‑comfortable) counts as inventing a word, and whether repurposing a word with a new sense counts as a new coinage; projects and articles note that sometimes later archival finds or lexicographic revisions remove or add attributions, so any fixed number is provisional [1] [6] [7].
5. A balanced conclusion — the most defensible answer today
The most defensible summary is that Shakespeare is responsible for the first known printed instances of many hundreds, and by broader counts over a thousand, words in English — typical authoritative claims center on about 1,700 such items when including prefixes, compounds and new senses, while more conservative, evidence‑strict lists put the number several hundred (commonly 594) if compounds and borderline cases are excluded [2] [3] [1]; importantly, scholars emphasize that “credited with” is not identical to incontrovertible invention, because the historical record is incomplete and lexicography evolves [6].
6. What this tells us about Shakespeare’s role in English
Regardless of the exact tally, every source agrees Shakespeare exercised prodigious lexical creativity — forming verbs from nouns, appending prefixes and suffixes, repurposing words with new meanings, and popularizing usages that migrated into common speech — and it is this demonstrable influence, rather than a single definitive number, that explains why Shakespeare is celebrated as a formative force in modern English [8] [9] [4].