Top 10 Words Shakespeare Just Made Up

Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets include the first ever recorded uses of over 1,700 words! These days, we take many of them for granted - like ‘puppy-dog’! In Shakespeare’s play “King John,” ‘puppy dog’ is uttered by Philip the Bastard, as he reacts to a boldly worded proposal from the citizen of a besieged city. Philip says, “Here’s a large mouth indeed / That spits forth death and mountains, rocks and Seas; / Talks as familiarly of roaring lions / As maids of thirteen do of puppy dogs”. In “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare famously asked, “What’s in a name?” suggesting that a name doesn’t affect the quality of an object. However, with the noun ‘puppy-dog’, we think he managed to make dogs even more adorable.

In his wordplay, Shakespeare would synthesize new words by taking two words and combining them, such as he did with ‘hot-blooded’. This compound word first appeared in Act II of King Lear, where the titular character says, “Why the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took / Our youngest born.” ‘Cold-blooded’ had been coined just a few years before; hot-blooded was a nice contrast that was a colorful way of suggesting passion. Perhaps the most famous application of the word is in the classic 1970’s song by Foreigner.

To invent a word, sometimes all Shakespeare had to do was take an existing word and reappropriate it into a different part of speech. For example, taking a verb and turning it into a noun or vice versa. This is what he did with the word scuffle in “Antony and Cleopatra,” which opens with Philo bemoaning Antony’s infatuation with the Egyptian Queen: “His captain’s heart, / Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst / The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper / And is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy’s lust.” Before that play, scuffle was only a verb, but Shakespeare counted on his audience to intuitively pick up on the meaning of the word’s new use.

One common trick Shakespeare used was to take an existing word, add a suffix that no one ever had previously applied to the word, and voila, you’ve got a new word. One such example is “eventful.” The word was coined in “As You Like It”, in the famous monologue from Jacques that opens with: “All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts”. The monologue ends with “Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” No doubt you’ve used the word “eventful” yourself to describe the nature of a day or occasion.

This is yet another example of Shakespeare taking an existing word and adding a suffix to derive a new concept. Laughable comes from “The Merchant of Venice,” where Salarino, who’s one of the friends of the main character Antonio, describes “strange fellows”, some who “laugh like parrots at a bag-piper, / And other of such vinegar aspect /That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile, / Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.” Nowadays, “laughable” is used less to describe a jest as worthy of laughter, and more to dismiss something as ludicrous.

Shakespeare based the word ‘hint’ on the Middle English word “hinten”, which meant ‘to tell or inform’. The word is used twice in Act I of Othello by the titular character. The very first usage is when he tells the Duke of Venice “It was my hint to speak”, and the second is when he says soon after “Upon this hint I spake”. His future wife Desdemona has given him the ‘hint’ that his stories of dangerous and daring deeds are the way to his heart - a hint he gladly follows. It feels pretty fitting the word ‘hint’ is Shakespearean, since it implies subtlety while being intellectually puzzling!

The word ‘fashionable’ appears in Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”, published in 1609, but probably written in 1602. The play is a tragic love story set during the Trojan War. Addressing Achilles, Ulysses compares time to a “fashionable host / That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand / And, with his arms outstretched as he would fly, / Grasps in the comer.” The idea captures the fickle nature of ‘fashions’, which come and go over time. Shakespeare was such a trendsetter that he gave us our word for trendsetters!

Shakespeare came up with this word in what might be his very first publication, the 1593 poem “Venus and Adonis”. In the poem, Adonis is trying to mind his own business and just wants to go hunting - but Venus, the goddess of love, is infatuated with him, and wants him to return her affections. Describing Apollo, the Bard wrote: “And with his bonnet hides his angry brow; / Looks on the dull earth with disturbed mind.” Shakespeare takes the word disturb, which at the time was only a verb, and then makes an adjective by applying the word to describe Adonis’s mind, thus coming up with a new way to call someone troubled.

From ‘quote’, it was a small jump to ‘misquote’, but nonetheless a very useful one! The word appears in the history play “Henry IV Part 1”, when Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester tells Sir Richard Vernon: “Look how we can, or sad or merrily, / Interpretation will misquote our looks, / And we shall feed like oxen at a stall, / The better cherished still the nearer death.” In this case, misquote doesn’t mean quoting written or spoken text inaccurately, but rather to misconstrue or misinterpret. Other new words from this play’s sequels, Part 2 and Part 3, include dauntless, bandit, and jaded.

Gossip comes from the Old English word “godsibb”, meaning “godparent”. In Middle English, it came to denote a familiar acquaintance. Shakespeare used the word ‘gossip’ in several different plays, giving it a new life as a verb. In “The Comedy of Errors”, likely written in the 1590s, Solinus, Duke of Ephesus exclaims “With all my heart I’ll gossip at this feast.” In “All’s Well That Ends Well”, the Gentlewoman Helen remarks: “with a world / Of pretty, fond adoptious christendoms / That blinking Cupid gossips”. Shakespeare recognized such interaction as human nature and gave the audience their fill. That’s why he’s studied and celebrated after all these years. The next time you spill the tea with your friends, you’re carrying on a proud literary tradition.