Shakespear Invented Words..

I came across this site this morning called "No Sweat Shakespear.com" (petiks much?!). A specific article got me interested (and I mean INTERESTED....you'll know in a while *wink), it says that out of 17,677 words he used in ALL his works, 1700 of those were first used by Shakespeare. Some say, when he couldn't think of a word that rhymes he would just invent new words so that the verse wouldn't get messed up. LOL. Anyways, no surprise there he IS the Master Wordsmith after all. But what's cool is that some of those are so widely used nowadays I bet you didn't think it was "invented" by Shakespeare...at least I didn't. Words so common such as "HURRY", "LONELY", "ROAD"...check out some other words below: Mooncake: Babe, did you know that the words "accommodation" and "hurry" where invented by Shakespeare?? actually he coined over a thousand words and is in the English dictionary??? :D

Boyfie: that is so geeky :-P

Mooncake: well, we're both geeks in different ways and language...just happens that mine's Shakespeare and your's Java....

Ok..I am not that Shakespeare geek (and Java isn't boyfie's 'language'......only--he also knows .PHP, .NET etc, etc ). Sure I know most of his famous works but I don't memorize them or something. Just a little disclaimer back there, oh. and that conversation actually transpired :P

So back to the invented words. Because I am a dork and there's not much work, I decided to validate this myself, so I got my researcher hat on :D

If I think of rrreeeally OLD literature/writtings, my first thought got to be the King James Version Bible. So accessed BibleGateway.com >Keyword Search > King James Version..typed in ALL the words in the list above and then bummed when 3 words matched."AMAZEMENT", "BLOODY" and "ROAD". So I researched on "The King James Version Bible" and it turned out that KJV was written in 1600s and Shakespeare has been writting way back 1585. So I decided to search for an earlier version Bible. Something that's produced, say, 1400 and found the Gutenberg Bible...

isn't it pretty? =^.^=

One problem though..The original book is written in freakin' Latin! Enough with Bibles. I decided to search for fictional literary works, again, in 1400. Surprisingly, I found one that I am quite familiar with... The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Familiar, meaning I don't really KNOW them, I'm just possitive I've read some of it back in highschool and it's in MODERN English. Canterbury Tales was originally written in Middle English which is sort of English-Latin mixture....

"The droghte° of Marche hath perced to the rote,° " - excerpt from general prologue

F***! Where the heck's English there? yeah the articles, sure.... Obviously I can't use this material for cross reference. Since I know by now that 1400 use friggin Middle English I decided to move one century up. Early 1500 literature....


Robert Greene had e few years headstart from Shakespeare as he is the first man to make a living out of writing. I chose his Romance work Pandosto. It is in English alright, however the Latin influence is still to "harsh" for me so I gave up on "pre-Shakespeare" writters and look for someone in the same time frame. Enter Edmund Spenser and his masterpiece The Faerie Queene



Although published about the sametime Shakespeare has JUST STARTED making a name of his own. I figured it would be unlikely for him to accept, better yet, use Shakespeare's new words and it turns out I MAY be right since I found not a single word from the list above. And that's enough to convince me that YES the list of words are LEGIT :) Hey! I'm not a historian or something..I'm just a curious dork who had no better thing to do :P

I did learn a thing or 2 here. I have found new appreciation for Shakespeare's work...Between him and Spenser his writting seems to be centuries modern and refined (20th century girl speaking here). And that Language is an ever evolving thing! Like here in the Philippines we over 170 languages. Just a mere 45mins to 1hr flight from Manila and I'll be in a land where people speak dialect different from mine. Not to mention the 'Slang', 'Gay-Lingo' and ...sige na nga 'Jejemon'....

Wouldn't it be cool if I could invent a word myself :)

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after a minute or so...
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so today I have officially invented the word "ZITFITTY" - it is an occurrence of pimple popping one after another. i.e. "I can't see you now..my face is zitfitty" LAME-OH!!!

from Shakespeare to Pimple...can this post get crappier???

=^.-=

images from Google, Wikipedia and other sites. None of the pictures belong to me.