How Did Shakespeare Change English? Words, Phrases and a Language in Motion

English between about 1500 and 1650 was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, had no dictionary, no academy and no settled spelling, and was absorbing thousands of words from Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish as scholars and traders brought them in. Writers were free to make words up, and did; the period's coinages arrive at a rate the language has not matched since, and educated readers argued about whether the borrowings, which their critics called inkhorn terms, were enriching the language or ruining it. Shakespeare wrote 39 plays and 154 sonnets into that opening, for a commercial theatre with an audience of several thousand a day drawn from every rank, which is the other part of the answer: the words had to work at once, on the ear, for apprentices and courtiers together.

The claim that he invented 1,700 words comes from counting the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary whose first recorded use is in his work, and the count has two problems. He was quoted more than anyone else because the dictionary's Victorian readers had read him more than anyone else, so his use is often the first recorded rather than the first; and printed drama survives where speech and pamphlets do not. Recent work with large digitised corpora has pushed hundreds of his supposed coinages earlier, and the honest estimate of words he actually minted is a few hundred. That is still an enormous number for one writer, and many of them are ordinary today:

• •Formed by adding a prefix or suffix: unreal, uncomfortable, unaware, gloomy, lonely, laughable, hostile
• •Formed by turning a noun into a verb, which he did constantly: to elbow, to gossip, to champion, to blanket
• •Compounds: eyeball, bedroom, birthplace, watchdog, bloodstained, cold-blooded
• •Borrowings and adaptations he was first to write down: assassination, dislocate, obscene, majestic, critic, dwindle
• •Words that did not take: honorificabilitudinitatibus, from Love's Labour's Lost, remains the longest word in his works and has never been needed since

The larger contribution is the set pieces, which entered the language whole and are used by people who do not know their source. Hamlet alone supplies to thine own self be true, the primrose path, more in sorrow than in anger, hoist with his own petard, the mind's eye, and method in his madness. Elsewhere: all that glisters is not gold, the world is my oyster, love is blind, brave new world, salad days, wear my heart upon my sleeve, and the game is afoot. A few are misquotations that stuck, since Macbeth's witches say something slightly different from what is usually attributed to them, and one, to gild the lily, is a shortening of a longer and stranger line about gilding refined gold and painting the lily. The phrases spread through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the plays became school texts and as the Victorians made him a national institution, and they were carried by the same empire that carried the language.

Shakespeare's English is early modern rather than old, and it is readable with effort because the grammar is nearly ours; the differences are the ones that trip modern readers: thou for the singular and familiar you, verb endings in -est and -eth, the older word order in questions and negatives, since do had not yet taken over, and a vocabulary in which many familiar words carry different senses, so that still means always, presently means at once, and nice means fastidious or trivial. He also used the freedom of an uninflected language to move words between parts of speech without apology, which is the habit that produced most of his coinages and which English has kept: a modern speaker who says they will diary an appointment or medal at the Olympics is doing exactly what he did with elbow and champion.

He did not standardise English, which the printers and the dictionary-makers did; he spelled his own name several ways. He did not stop the language changing, and his own text has needed glossing since the eighteenth century. And the picture of a lone genius filling an empty language is wrong in both halves: he worked in a crowded theatre trade, collaborated on several plays, borrowed almost every plot, and wrote alongside Marlowe, Jonson and a dozen others who were coining words too. What he did was write a body of work good enough to be memorised, performed and quoted continuously for four hundred years, which is the mechanism by which a writer's vocabulary becomes everyone's.

Nobody recorded Shakespeare's voice, yet scholars can reconstruct roughly how his English sounded. The evidence comes from three places: rhymes in the plays and sonnets that no longer work in modern speech, puns that only succeed if two words once sounded alike, and the spellings of the period, which were loose enough to reflect how writers and printers actually heard words. Descriptions by contemporary teachers of pronunciation add further detail. Together they point to an accent in which the r after a vowel was sounded, and in which many vowels sat part of the way through the Great Vowel Shift rather than where they are now.

Hearing the plays that way can restore jokes that have gone silent. In As You Like It a speech runs from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and in the pronunciation of the time hour sounded close to whore, turning a gloomy reflection on ageing into a bawdy one. Sonnets that seem to end on half-rhymes, such as love paired with prove, rhymed fully then. Productions in reconstructed original pronunciation at London's Globe theatre in the 2000s found the accent easier for audiences to follow than many had expected, and listeners often said it sounded closer to modern regional speech than to polished stage English.

The other great store of everyday English phrases from the same years is the King James Bible of 1611, published while Shakespeare was still alive, and the two are often confused. By the skin of your teeth, the salt of the earth, the powers that be, see eye to eye and a law unto themselves all come from biblical translation rather than from the stage. People who credit Shakespeare with any old-sounding phrase are often quoting the Bible without knowing it, and the reverse mistake happens too, since both texts were read, heard and memorised by the same generations.

The two worked in opposite ways, though. The Bible's translators, around fifty scholars working in committees, were deliberately conservative, and much of their wording was inherited from William Tyndale, who had translated the New Testament from Greek in the 1520s and was executed in 1536. The result already sounded old-fashioned in 1611, keeping thou and the -eth endings as everyday speech moved away from them, and it coined very few new words. Its influence came instead from being read aloud every week in every parish for centuries, which fixed its phrases in memory much as performance did for Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare did not publish a collected edition of his plays. Seven years after his death, in 1623, two of his fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered thirty-six of them into a large volume now known as the First Folio. Eighteen of those plays, including Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, had never been printed before.

Without the Folio, those plays, and the many words and phrases they contain, might well have been lost. Around 750 copies are thought to have been printed, and about 235 survive, making it one of the most valuable books in the world. Much of what we credit to Shakespeare's influence on English depends on the decision of two colleagues to preserve his work.

Shakespeare wrote at the moment when English was expanding fastest and had no dictionary or academy to restrain it, and he minted a few hundred words rather than the two thousand usually claimed, mostly by adding prefixes, making nouns into verbs and building compounds, along with hundreds of phrases that entered the language whole. The count is inflated because the Oxford dictionary's readers quoted him more than anyone, and his real influence came from being performed and quoted continuously for four centuries.