20 Everyday Words Shakespeare Invented

Back in high school English class, Shakespeare felt like homework. All that thee-and-thou business, those plots full of swords and schemes. But here is something your teacher may not have mentioned: some of the most ordinary words in your everyday vocabulary came straight from his pen.

Shakespeare is credited with coining as many as 1,700 words. Some were truly new inventions. Others were older words he twisted into fresh uses, turning nouns into verbs, adding a suffix here and there. Either way, his fingerprints are all over the English language.

Here are 20 words you probably use without giving them a second thought, all of them traced back to Shakespeare.

Words from the Comedies and Histories

• After-hours — Shakespeare used this phrase in both Romeo and Juliet and Richard III, meaning the period immediately following something, or its later moments.
• Bare-faced — First used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to mean a face with no beard or covering. Then in Hamlet, he gave it the figurative meaning we use today: plain, undisguised, overt.
• Bedazzle — Dazzle goes back to medieval times and once meant to temporarily lose your sight staring at a bright light. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare added an intensifying be– to the front of it.
• Eventful — He wrote of a “strange eventful history” in As You Like It, and in doing so gave us a word for any experience that is exciting or memorable.
• Hot-blooded — From The Merry Wives of Windsor, where he wrote of the work of “the hot-blooded Gods.” We still use it the same way today to describe someone with strong, easily roused emotions.
• Outstay — Yes, the very phrase “outstay your welcome” was coined in As You Like It.
• Priceless — “What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent,” Shakespeare wrote in his 1594 narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. A new word for something of inestimable worth.
• Shooting star — Meteors have been called falling stars since the 1400s. But it was Shakespeare, in Act 2 of Richard II, who apparently first called one a shooting star.

Words from the Tragedies

• Baseless — Coined in The Tempest to describe something with no foundation, groundless or unreasonable.
• Characterless — Shakespeare invented this one in Troilus and Cressida to describe mighty states rendered “characterless … to dusty nothing.” No original or identifiable features.
• Dislocate — The verb existed before Shakespeare, but King Lear gives us the earliest known record of its use in the medical sense: the painful displacement of a bone or joint.
• Droplet — The suffix -let makes words smaller in English, as in booklet, leaflet, or piglet. Shakespeare attached it to drop in his late tragedy Timon of Athens.
• Footfall — Coined to describe the sound of a person’s feet as they walk. The modern retail use of the word, meaning the number of customers entering a store, came along later, in the 1970s.
• Leaky — “Thou art so leaky that we must leave thee to thy sinking,” says a character in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s works provide the earliest known records of this simple, everyday adjective.
• Low-rated — English borrowed the verb rate from French in medieval times. It was Shakespeare who first used it as the specific adjective low-rated in Henry V.
• Muddy — The verb muddy, meaning to make something confused or indistinct, appears to have been invented by Shakespeare and first used in Hamlet.
• Noiseless — A synonym for silent, coined in Act 4 of King Lear.
• Splitting — Next time you have a splitting headache, Shakespeare is to blame. He was the first to use splitting as an adjective describing anything with the power to rend apart, in Troilus and Cressida.
• Tardiness — The adjective tardy came into English from French. But it was Shakespeare who added the -ness suffix to create a noun out of it, in the opening act of King Lear.
• Widowmaker — The earliest recorded use of this word comes from Shakespeare’s retelling of the story of King John. Today it is used especially in military contexts to refer to potentially deadly weaponry or machinery.