How many words did William Shakespeare invent?

Shakespeare is credited with creating as many as 1,700 words in total, spread over all of his published works. He achieved this by combining words, modifying existing ones with prefixes and suffixes, converting nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, and adding new ones altogether.

Although many of these 1,700 words are referred to as Shakespearean inventions, many of them were likely in use during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras but were not recorded before Shakespeare used them in his works. In these instances, Shakespeare is only the first person to record these phrases in writing.

Moreover, Shakespeare is often inaccurately credited with the first use of words that are found in other writers, according to historian Jonathan Hope, who notes that Victorian scholars who read texts for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary read Shakespeare's texts more thoroughly than most and cited him more frequently.

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