Neologisms by Shakespeare

Question

In Richard Lederer's "The Miracle of Language" he says that "of the 20,138 basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, sonnets, and other poems, his is the first known use of over 1700 of them." Does anyone know of any documented study that cites this figure of approximately 1700?

Usenet · Accepted Answer

It's already common knowledge that Shakespeare created many words, so there must be literature on this subject and a google search would come up with the technical detail you're searching.
I believe a discussion on which particular base words are Shakespeare-made would be much more interesting than a quotation *** web address of the exact number.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In Richard Lederer's "The Miracle of Language" he says that "of the 20,138 basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, ... use of over 1700 of them." Does anyone know of any documented study that cites this figure of approximately 1700?[/nq]
It could easily be gotten from an electronic OED, but the problem is that when the old OED crew traced a word back to Shakespeare, they didn't look very hard for any prior attestations. (This is mentioned in Willinsky's Empire of Words.)

Peter T. Daniels (Email Removed)

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In Richard Lederer's "The Miracle of Language" he says that "of the 20,138 basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, ... use of over 1700 of them." Does anyone know of any documented study that cites this figure of approximately 1700?[/nq]
I knew someone published on this a couple of years ago. This must be it, referred to in a Shakespeare discussion forum:
In the book "Coined by Shakespeare: Words and Meanings First Penned by the Bard" by Jeffrey McQuain and Stanley Malless, published by Merriam-Webster they state "Guesses have ranged from a few hundred terms to more than 10,000, with the most likely estimate approximately 1,500 words."

Best Donna Richoux

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[nq:2]In Richard Lederer's "The Miracle of Language" he says that ... any documented study that cites this figure of approximately 1700?[/nq]
[nq:1]I knew someone published on this a couple of years ago. This must be it, referred to in a Shakespeare ... "Guesses have ranged from a few hundred terms to more than 10,000, with the most likely estimate approximately 1,500 words."[/nq]
I was just at Rhymezone's Shakespeare site for something else, and happened to notice this page, which might interest you:

http://www.rhymezone.com/r/gwic.cgi?Path=shakespeare/coinages//

Best Donna Richoux

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[nq:1]In Richard Lederer's "The Miracle of Language" he says that "of the 20,138 basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, ... use of over 1700 of them." Does anyone know of any documented study that cites this figure of approximately 1700?[/nq]Sorry, I don't. But I hope you won't consider my intervention an irrelevance when I say that that's one of the things that's most exciting about his work. The language was in a ferment to match the political and religious upheavals and uncertainties of the day. Middle English wasn't dead if you'd tripped around the farms, you'd have found that it wasn't dead in 1950. Shakespeare could talk posh. (I'd even suggest that economics played a part: for the first time, it was by no means sure that a day's work would feed, clothe, and shelter a family for a day.

Pauperism seems to me to have come into existence in Tudor times. I don't think anybody then understood the first thing about inflation, though with hindsight we can see it vitiating Henry VIII's kingship. His predecessor may have had a clearer grasp of national accountancy, but he died.)Shakespeare's language makes me think of West Indian poets of our time: bubbling and slashing, grabbing at anything that strikes a chord or calls up an image; pulling up images and metaphors from the distant past and the most immediate present, and wrenching them into something as fresh-minted as it is familiar. "Listen to me, or *** off: I don't care which." Most metropolitan English-language poets of our day have lost their *****, and don't seem to mind.

I think of the once-talented Thom Gunn, who's on record as saying his friends don't even know he's a poet. WTF? Imagine a bricklayer whose friends don't know he's a bricklayer. Are you ashamed of your craft, Thom? Or, once you've drifted away from the safely congratulatory little surroundings of Oxford, do you begin to fear there wasn't really much craft to boast of? A poet's an entertainer, a chaired bard, a beautiful bull artist, a braggart. Or nothing.
West Indian writers have tension*, they have *uncertainty: are they British, or are they Central-American? Or are they just good honest West Indian? What does British mean to them? What does American mean to them? What does West Indian mean to anybody? Are they Standard English or are they Creole? Which great (maybe
great-great)-grandparent do they favour, French, English, African, Spanish? Catholic, Protestant? Could they be invaded by Yankees or Cubans? Is there some place they need to go to fulfil themselves? if so, where? Or should they stay home and build new?

Just so, an Englishman, Irishman, or Scotsman of the sixteenth century wanted to know if he was European or Islander, Protestant or Catholic (because these lines were then far from clear) or Atheist, pro- or anti- Spain, Classical or Modern, Devonshire or Centralist; or bust out of the whole awful thing and go West to start anew. Shakespeare, for whatever reason, stayed on in the middle of it and wrangled language half to death, and we are in his debt.
Mike.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]In Richard Lederer's "The Miracle of Language" he says that "of the 20,138 basewords that Shakespeare employs in his plays, ... use of over 1700 of them." Does anyone know of any documented study that cites this figure of approximately 1700?[/nq]
Google is your friend:

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]It's not common knowledge in my house. The fact that OED gives Shakespeare as the earliest cite for many words ... 'excellent' when OED attests to usages from C14 and Bill says 'summit' is the Bard's when it was known to[/nq]
I never did like bryson's stuff.
Anyway, here's something somewhat related:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/arts/02SHAK.html?th Seeing the Fingerprints of Other Hands in Shakespeare By WILLIAM S. NIEDERKORNIn matters of Shakespeare authorship, it is often said that nothing is ever resolved. But in a recent book Brian Vickers, director of Renaissance Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has brought clarity to the old and hotly debated question of Shakespeare's work with co-authors. As a result changes will be made in some future editions of Shakespeare. In "Shakespeare, Co-Author" (Oxford University Press, 2002), Professor Vickers, 65, shows how numerous tests by many generations of scholars demonstrate substantial work by other playwrights in five Shakespeare plays.

Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit. The plays are not the top five in the Shakespeare canon. But the overwhelming evidence in the book shows that George Peele, not Shakespeare, wrote almost a third of "Titus Andronicus"; Thomas Middleton, about two-fifths of "Timon of Athens"; George Wilkins, two of the five acts of "Pericles"; and John Fletcher, more than half of "Henry VIII." "The Two Noble Kinsmen," originally published in 1634 as the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, is shown to be about two-fifths Shakespeare's.

None of the complete editions of Shakespeare have given a full account of Peele's work on "Titus Andronicus," and they often hedge on the co-authorship of the other plays. Rarely does any edition state with confidence what scenes or parts of scenes are by co-authors. The evidence has been out there, some of it for over a century, some for only a few years, but even experts have found it hard to keep track of the players. Now Professor Vickers has given them a score card.

Calling the book "a triumphant application of scientific method to literary-attribution studies," the writer and editor Jonathan Bate, who left Peele out of his 1995 Arden edition of "Titus," wrote in a recent article in The TLS, the British literary weekly, "I am in the privileged - or perhaps embarrassing - position of being able to confirm the accuracy of Vickers's
diagnosis."
snip-

Neologisms by Shakespeare

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