by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: June 15, 2008   Last Updated: November 11, 2010

William Shakespeare reportedly had a vocabulary of around 29,000 words, and some 1700 of those were original coinages. A few are obscure, but most remain in everyday parlance nearly four hundred years after he first came up with them. Often people use common phrases and are unaware that they are quoting his inventions.

The first use of the term "assassination" was in Macbeth's soliloquy contemplating the murder of King Duncan.

. . .if the assassination/ Could trammel up the consequence and catch/ With his surcease success . . . .

The English word "assassin" had been around since the 11th century - a translation of the Arabic "hashshashin" or hashish addict - but Shakespeare was the first to make a back-formation noun to denote the action performed.

According to the O.E.D, Shakespeare came up with the adjective "suspicious," using it in Parts i , ii, and iii of King Henry VI; once in King Henry VIII; and once in Love's Labour's Lost. He compounded a word meaning "obvious, unconcealed, beardless and wearing no mask" when Macbeth says to the two murderers about Banquo, ". . . I could/ With barefaced power sweep him from my sight . . . ," also in Hamlet when mad Ophelia sings, "They bore him barefaced on the bier . . . ."

Our commonplace adjective "critical." in its current primary meaning of faultfinding, first appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream and later in Othello. The first appearance of the hyphenated term  "leap-frog" is in King Henry V.

Turning from single words to Shakespeare's phrases and idioms, here are some that have become hackneyed with overuse. In King Henry VI, Part ii, we find "dead as a doornail." And you probably didn't realize you were quoting the Bard when you said things like "What the dickens! . . . I'll tell the world. .. .  in such a pickle . . . There is something in the wind . . . I will tell you my drift . . . with bag and baggage." If you described a fit of laughter as being in stitches, you have misquoted slightly. In Twelfth Night, Maria first used the phrase "laugh yourself into stitches." The expression did not catch immediate attention. It wasn't heard elsewhere until 1914 when a newspaper reporter described a comedian "keeping his audience in stitches."

Add to the list: "a sorry sight . . . thereby hangs a tale . . .  as good luck would have it . . .  at one fell swoop . . . neither rhyme nor reason . . ." and literally hundreds more.

I've saved space for minor changes we moderns have made to the original. 

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