We’re pretty big on words over here at Succeed With Dyslexia.
And we believe that everybody should be able enjoy reading them – whether you feel like a natural reader or whether you’ve got literacy differences like dyslexia; whether you prefer to read an ink-and-paper book or experience vibrant literary worlds though your headphones. We’re big proponents of the idea that reading for pleasure is one of the best hobbies and it can have a hugely positive impact on all kinds of skills, as well as change lives for the better.
But sometimes traditionally set-up school and college lessons aren’t the best environments for reading in if you struggle with dyslexia or literacy differences. And one fella that always tops the charts in ‘worst high-school memories’ is, unfortunately, one of the English language’s most interesting figures when it comes to his language and his world.
So today, we’re taking a look at the creative wordpower of one of the world’s most lauded authors who’s pretty much roundly despised by 11-18 year-olds everywhere (and we even sent our roving reporter out to have a closer peek at his historic crib, too). Stay tuned and buckle up, because things are about to get wordy.
So… what’s so interesting about Shakespeare and words?
He was pretty fond of them – he wrote about 835,997 of them in his plays. Hamlet comes in with the most words, at 30,557, and The Comedy of Errors with the least, at a piffling 14,701.
I was hoping for something a little more inspiring?
Fine, fine.
The English-speaking vocabulary expanded dramatically during the Early Modern period when Shakespeare was writing, largely due to slight increases in literacy and a flowering of literary and dramatic arts and culture.
But Shakespeare was actually one of the creative powerhouses of language his century in that he created a large amount of words, as well as wrote them down in some pretty nifty arrangements. It was a time in which language was much more free and easy than it is today, and crafting and adapting words was actually fairly common for playwrights and poets… but Shakespeare appears to he been unusually prolific in this respect as he’s credited with creating a whole lot of new words and neologisms. Zany, besmirch, yelping, well-educated, unhappy, on purpose, outbreak, lonely, laughable, full-grown, critic, elbow, luggage, torture, worthless, glow, hostile, employment, dwindle, resolve… there’s a fair few.
How many words exactly, though?
It’s probably more than you’d expect.
LitCharts has an academic run-down of how many and which words Shakespeare invented in his lifetime – there’s a bit of debate as to whether it’s 1,700… or actually more like 400. Estimates differ, because just because the first instance of a word is actually in one of Shakespeare’s plays or poems, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he invented it. It could just be that nobody wrote it down before, or more likely, that whatever it was written down in simply didn’t survive the ages.
And spelling?
Our Bill was actually pretty horrific at spelling – but most people living in Tudor and Stuart England were, to the extent that you couldn’t really even say ‘horrific at spelling’ was a thing that you could be. This was an age of relatively low literacy, where only the clergy, gentry and merchant classes were actually properly literate in the way we’d recognise today, and there was no standardised spelling except for in very rare occasions. It was more of a case that there was no right or wrong way to spell a word, because there was no dictionary in existence to refer to. There were some attempts to standardise spellings throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as printing and publishing really took off, but nothing major.
It’s actually a fairly logical system: If you wanted to write about a table, both table, tabel, taybel and tabele would be absolutely fine spellings to use because it’s still apparent that you’re writing about a table, and nobody had picked which one was the one was standard yet. And with only twenty-four letters in the alphabet–
Pretty sure there’s 26 letters in the alphabet, pal.
You’d be absolutely right in saying that… in the year 2021. Unlike the modern English alphabet that we use today, the Tudor English alphabet only had 24. If you were to open a manuscript written in, say, 1589, you’d see that the letter I and the letter J are used for the same sounds, as are U and V.
There were some pretty complicated rules about it too – despite letters being used for the same sound, a lot of it was situational. The words we’d nowadays spell with a capital J, Tudor writers would spell with a capital I – so Job would be Iob, Jelly would be Ielly. They’d also only place a letter U in the middle of a word, and use V for the beginning – so Umbrella would look an awful lot like Vmbrella, but a word like ‘hut’ with a U in the middle would remain the same.
They also sometimes used a letter that looked a lot like a Y to make a ‘th’ sound, which sounded a lot like ‘ye’ when spoken. This is where we get ye olde from – it’s not a different word altogether, it’s just that your local ye olde fish and chip shop or ye olde book store is using a phonetic representation of a lost letter from the English language, that incidentally sounds like a modern Y, but back then was used for a denotation of ‘th’.
Sounds like a nightmare, if I’m honest – so an ‘I’ is a ‘J’ and a ‘Y’ is a ‘Th’?
Yes. In Shakespeare's English anyway – called 'Middle English' if we want to get technical. If we go back even further and look at Old English (spoken and written mainly in the period 400-1100), the ‘th’ sound was actually created using another different letter called the ‘Thorn’, which looks a little bit like a lower-case B with a long tail, or a P who isn’t putting the effort in: Þ or þ. It exists in Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, and even shows up sometimes in some Middle English dialects, but not with a huge amount of frequency.
There are more lost letters in the English language as well as the Thorn. There’s the Wynn (Ƿ, ƿ) that predates the W that has its roots in the old Norse Futhark runic alphabet, and there’s the Eth (Ð, ð) that probably originates from the Irish language and sounded a lot like the Thorn but not quite, but was phased out in favour of the Thorn before the end of the first millennium.
There’s also the Ash (Æ, æ) that actually persisted well into the early twentieth century in spellings of words like encyclopædia and Medæval, making a short ‘eay’ sound; and then there’s the Ethel (Œ, œ) which had a similar long-e sound to the Ash, but was eventually replaced by the standard letter E. Ghosts of it still hang around in words like subpœna and amoœba.
So does Shakespeare use any of these wacky letters?
Kind of. They’d largely fallen out of use by the time his work was being published, but they didn’t exactly disappear, either.
The First Folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, collated and published in 1623. 36 of the 37 plays that we attribute to him are contained in the book, and age-wise, it’s the closest we’ve got to a complete copy of his works published in his lifetime.
If we look at it, there are some characters that might look a little familiar…
Like Banquo and Hamlet?
Stop it, or we’ll call your parents to come and pick you up.
We can see some of these conjoined letter symbols in copies of Shakespeare’s folios that were printed close to the time that they were written, but they’d stopped being regarded as ‘letters’ and stopped being recognised as individual units in the alphabet. Instead, we ended up with something called a ligature.
Even when the Old English letters themselves had fallen out of use, a hybrid version of the letter sound was still used to create words on the page when texts were being printed. The idea of moveable type was fairly new, and the letter tiles that they used to actually impress the ink on the page were based on handwriting, so many typefaces in Middle English included ligatures with their roots in these old letters- like æ and œ- with their standard alphabet of tiles. There were quite a few, but one that looks the strangest to a modern audience is probably ST as the conjoined ‘st’ with a topcurl like the one in the picture over there. Some letters also became ligatured due to ‘kerns’ – the projecting metal type letter on a printing tile – and how with some letter conjunctions they’d commonly overlap. This ended up with it being far easier to represent things like FFL as the conjoined ffl - one tile, no overlapping, no worries.
There are also some other strange characters in Shakespeare’s typefaces, and one that sticks our particularly is the ‘Long S’ character - ſ. It’s not used now, but back then it replaced the single S-sound or even the double S-sound in a word that had a double-S spelling – so you’d end up with something like ‘ſinfulneſs’ for ‘sinfulness’, or ‘poſseſs’ for possess. There were rules to it – you couldn’t use it at a word ending, for example- that’d be wholly reserved for the ‘Round S’ or ‘Terminal S’ that we use today; and you couldn’t use it before an apostrophe as you’d see in archaic word representations like clos’d or bemus’d.
And don’t even get us started on ampersands – that one started life as the written representation of the Anglo-Norman French word et meaning and, and then slowly got worn down into the standard & we all know and love today. They show up in the Folio typeface too!
That's... a wild ride.
All in all, words, letters and typefaces were pretty wild in Shakespeare’s day – although there was no standardised spelling system and you could make up words as you wished, there were an awful lot of weird rules to keep track of when it came to actually representing words on a page too. But it’s all pretty interesting stuff too, especially considering how we treat things like spelling and letters these days – it’s strange to imagine an age when the rules were different and they didn’t necessarily get seen as the building blocks of literacy as we see them today.
This term, even if you’re bored to death of hearing about Banquo’s ghost and his chickens or Lady Macbeth and her murderess routine, console yourself with the thought that the language and the letters that make up these plays is actually supremely wild and wacky… and in 500 years somebody might equally be reading one of your own essays, and saying ‘yikes… it's so old and weird.’