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In a way it's a rather strange idea, even if not taken to extreme, because his plays absolutely had to be understandable to his audiences, which would have put

In a way it's a rather strange idea, even if not taken to extreme, because his plays absolutely had to be understandable to his audiences, which would have put a limit on how many novel expressions he could have and still be understood. After all, people do sometimes forget that Shakespeare was not merely a manufacturer of devices to torture schoolchildren, but he was, in fact, also a playwright. Is it possible that what happened was that pre-digitization research was too time-consuming, so the OED overemphasized easily available sources, like Shakespeare, when looking for first uses of words?

duaneb 10y ago
Even if his allegedly invented words were entirely novel, I think it's unlikely people would have had issues understanding him. The same mechanisms (combining extant prefixex, suffixex, roots into new combinations and onomatopoeias) are easily visible in slang today—just listen to hip-hop. Just this morning I heard "discriminize" instead of "discriminate" to fit a rhyme scheme. Is that really so different from creating "assassination" from "assassin"? But, it's a narrow interpretation of the results that this is novel. Etymologists have always been extremely skittish of assigning firm origins to words, much less calling Shakespeare an inventor of them himself. His demonstrated vocabulary is simply massive, and statistically some of the words are going to be early.
- lawpoop 10y ago
  This is purely speculative, but I think also that introducing new words, or novel combinations would have kept audiences' ears "on their toes" and tuned in to the dialog. The plays ran 2-3 hours. You have to keep the audience engaged.
sverige 10y ago
Interestingly, one of the major contributors to the original OED was a prisoner who had lots of time to read lots of books and research first uses of words. He had a prodigious memory as well. I suspect Shakespeare gets the nod so frequently because he wrote a lot of stuff in Early Modern English that survived and was widely available in the 19th century when work on the OED began. Other writers' works were extant, but not widely read or available. The OED notes the earliest printed use of the word meaning, so even if perhaps some dullard like Algernon Sidney used a word first, almost no one actually reads those works, nor read them in the 19th century.
- aptwebapps 10y ago
  "Interestingly, one of the major contributors to the original OED was a prisoner who had lots of time to read lots of books and research first uses of words. He had a prodigious memory as well." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor
  - sverige 10y ago
    Thanks, I was too lazy to look it up while trying to remember Algernon Sidney's name!

duaneb 10y ago

Even if his allegedly invented words were entirely novel, I think it's unlikely people would have had issues understanding him. The same mechanisms (combining extant prefixex, suffixex, roots into new combinations and onomatopoeias) are easily visible in slang today—just listen to hip-hop. Just this morning I heard "discriminize" instead of "discriminate" to fit a rhyme scheme. Is that really so different from creating "assassination" from "assassin"? But, it's a narrow interpretation of the results that this is novel. Etymologists have always been extremely skittish of assigning firm origins to words, much less calling Shakespeare an inventor of them himself. His demonstrated vocabulary is simply massive, and statistically some of the words are going to be early.

lawpoop 10y ago
This is purely speculative, but I think also that introducing new words, or novel combinations would have kept audiences' ears "on their toes" and tuned in to the dialog. The plays ran 2-3 hours. You have to keep the audience engaged.

sverige 10y ago

Interestingly, one of the major contributors to the original OED was a prisoner who had lots of time to read lots of books and research first uses of words. He had a prodigious memory as well. I suspect Shakespeare gets the nod so frequently because he wrote a lot of stuff in Early Modern English that survived and was widely available in the 19th century when work on the OED began. Other writers' works were extant, but not widely read or available. The OED notes the earliest printed use of the word meaning, so even if perhaps some dullard like Algernon Sidney used a word first, almost no one actually reads those works, nor read them in the 19th century.

aptwebapps 10y ago
"Interestingly, one of the major contributors to the original OED was a prisoner who had lots of time to read lots of books and research first uses of words. He had a prodigious memory as well." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor
- sverige 10y ago
  Thanks, I was too lazy to look it up while trying to remember Algernon Sidney's name!