Shakespeare's Vocabulary

Although the average English speaker has a vocabulary of about 4000 words, Shakespeare had about 29,000 different words published in his plays. Shakespeare invented many new words (credited with 2,000) by playing with language and many of these have become part of our language today such as:

Accused
Addiction
Arouse
Assassinate
Blushing
Champion
Circumstantial
Compromise
Courtship
Countless
Critic
Dawn
Epileptic
Elbow
Excitement

Frugal
Generous
Gossip Amazement
Gloomy
Zany
Equivocal
Barefaced
Critical
Leapfrog
Lonely
Obscene
Submerged
Fretful
Hurry		 Hint
Impartial
Invulnerable
Jaded
Label
Luggage
Majestic
Negotiate
Premeditated
Puke
Scuffle
Torture
Tranquil
Varied
Worthless

and exposure, just to name a few.

He also invented many of the most common phrases used today such as:

"foul play"
"as luck would have it"
"your own flesh and blood"
"too much of a good thing"
"good riddance"
"in one fell swoop"
"cruel to be kind"
"play fast and loose"
"vanish into thin air"
"the game is up"
"truth will out"
"in the twinkling of an eye"

All of these words can make for difficult reading, but once you adjust, it becomes much easier. Coleridge said of Shakespeare 'I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man.' It's true Coleridge was talking two centuries ago, but he was also talking two centuries after Shakespeare.