piksels

Today while browsing the ever so beautiful interwebs, I came across something interesting about Shakespeare. Turns out that our second favourite William (after the one and only William Gates of course) invented over 1700 of the words we use commonly use, by simply turning nouns into verbs, adjectives into verbs, and so forth..

Here is a very small list of words he invented:

1. Accused
2. Addiction
3. Advertising
4. Amazement
5. Arouse
6. Assassination
7. Bandit
8. Bedroom
9. Beached
10. Blanket
11. Bump
12. Cater
13. Champion
14. Countless
15. Epileptic
16. Fixture
17. Flawed
18. Generous
19. Hint
20. Lonely
21. Mimic
22. Negotiate
23. Obscene
24. Premeditated
25. Rant
26. Summit
27. Torture
28. Varied
29. Worthless
30. Zany

Well the list goes on, and you can read more about it here, or phrases he invented here. It is not surprising that he has had so much influence on the English language, as he is arguably the greatest playwright ever. But it is remarkable how he never felt confined to using only ‘true’ lexicon.

It is disappointing that we are taught that there is a word for everything, because it hampers our imagination to develop, to feel, to express, anything which has not been defined before. And sometimes we convince ourselves that if there is no word for it, then it cannot exist.

I hope we all can take an example from Shakespeare, and dare to break the structured guidelines.