Five myths about Shakespeare’s contribution to the English language

Shakespeare's language is widely considered to represent the pinnacle of English. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust puts it at 1,700, but carefully add that this number concerns words whose earliest appearance is in Shakespeare's works. Shakespeare IS the English language The myth that Shakespeare coined loads of words has partly fueled the myth that Shakespeare's language constitutes one-quarter, a half or even all of the words of today's English language. Even if every word within Shakespeare had been coined by him, that would still only be 4.2% of today's English language. Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary Ludicrously, popular claims about Shakespeare's huge vocabulary seem to be driven by the fact that his writings as a whole contain a large number of different words.