1150: How Large was Shakespeare's Vocabulary? Feb 1, 2018

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Following yesterday's post about Shakespeare, another possible misconception about the vocabulary he used was in the number of distinct words he used in total. The number is 24,000-28,000, though the exact number is tough to gauge especially with ordinary compounding [2], but also that he would quote things from foreign languages verbatim sometimes. This has been suggested to mean that he knew around 100,000 words, which is certainly quite impressive. Nevertheless, this also has to take into account the vast amount of words that he used in the first place; between sonnets, full plays and everything else that he wrote, there is no doubt that he was prolific, but when compared to other works by the total number of words used therein, according to Matt Daniels' statistics, the first 35,000 words of Moby Dick has more distinct words than all of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, and Troilus and Cressida. Moreover, that same study compared Shakespeare to modern rappers, and using the same, first 35,000 word mark, a few artists including Aesop Rock used more than those writers in his songs. Shakespeare's language and was certainly impressive, but he is not necessarily as revolutionary as people can make him out to be.
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