Not for Horrid Profs

Colin Burrow

  • Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode
    Allen Lane, 324 pp, £20.00, April 2000, ISBN 0 7139 9378 2

The Oxford English Dictionary cites more than 33,000 passages from Shakespeare to illustrate the sense of English words. About 1900 of its main entries have first citations from Shakespeare. Although these figures are certain to over-estimate the impact of Shakespeare on the language there is no doubt that his vocabulary of about 29,000 words left English greater in all ways than it was before. This was largely a result of his extraordinary willingness to make nouns verbs and verbs nouns, to add prefixes and suffixes, and use words previously undocumented.

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