EWe all know that William Shakespeare is one of the most well known poets of our time, and the past 500 years. But the man has many different rumours floating around him. You may have heard that he didn’t even exist, and that he was really a fake name for a different person to write these plays. You may have heard he was actually a baron or duke in disguise, or that he is responsible for inventing hundreds of words for the English language. Well today I am aiming to debunk, or prove, that last rumour. Did Shakespeare really invent over 1700 words?

Shakespeare was born in the late 1500s, just before or in the beginning of the Renaissance. So very few people were dedicating their lives to science, knowledge, etc. This meant that the world was not as advanced in many different aspects. One aspect would be literature and language. So many words we know today were not around yet. Words like bachelorship, lacklustre, and bare-faced are all known to being invented by Shakespeare. But lets look at these words for a second. They all have a thing in common. Each one is two different words combined to form a new meaning. Shakespeare did this a lot actually. There are many words that Shakespeare supposedly invented that are two different words connected to mean something different.

Shakespeare was also a master of prefixes. By using prefixes like con and un he created words like congreeted and unearthly. This is technically creating words, but he really just took a prefix and mashed it together with an already made up word.