Lag din egen! *As mentioned above the actual Shakespeare's vocabulary could have contained over 65,000 words. Shakespeare Vocabulary. So you’d have to get the sources again, determine which capitalized words are proper nouns and then perform the analysis. Shakespeare’s Vocabulary Considered Unexceptional. Statisticians Bradley Efron and Ronald Thisted tried to figure out how many words Shakespeare actually knew. Add to this that the estimates of the size of Shakespeare's vocabulary run to as high as 25,000 words. It’s about the supposedly extraordinary nature of his vocabulary. A place to share and discuss visual representations of data: Graphs … I had thought of a counter-argument to your time thesis: that Dickens was a more prosaic writer writing simpler narrative/populist works (I believe Shakespeare was popular, but considered “clever” and wordy by the groundlings), which might explain why his vocabulary was less broad. Click the image for definitions of frequently used words in his plays that you may not know. ELIZABETHAN LANGUAGE TERMS ELIZABETHAN Æ CONTEMPORARY Listed below are some common Elizabethan terms you will come across while reading Shakespeare. Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, HAMLET, POLONIUS, LAERTES, VOLTIMAND, CORNELIUS, Lords, and Attendants KING CLAUDIUS Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death Take the test and find out your vocabulary size… The sixteenth century saw all the nations of Europe engaged on this project, of which Bacon and Sir Philip Sidney are known to have been involved, and which we can see that Shakespeare was too by his very achievement. *’s”) were removed. You’re applying rules to measure the impact of a notorious and shameless rulebreaker. What I discovered suggests that Shakespeare’s vocabulary, while far from small, is far from extraordinary among writers when size of corpus is taken into account. Whatever the size of the English lexicon at the time, Shakespeare was in command of a substantial portion of it. After a shipwreck, a group of noblemen wash up on an enchanted island ruled by the magician Prospero. They are accessible from the home page. Click the image for the Lexiconic of words Shakespeare used in his plays and sonnets. Shakespeare’s vocabulary might be reduced further if we took out place and other names from his works, and removed the variant spellings more common in the era before standardized spelling. Size of vocabulary is not the same thing as quality of work, mind you. We only include words that no longer exist in Modern English, have changed their meaning since Shakespeare's day, or have an encyclopedic or specialized sense that would make them unfamiliar to many modern readers. A stemmed word is a “root” form of a word that may have several distinct relations in other word tokens. Raw Lyrics Data via John W. Miller. The myth of Shakepeare’s unusually large vocabulary suggests that our view of Shakespeare has been warped by our veneration of his work. Have a look at some of the words created and used by this literary genius in alphabetic order. Further reading: http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ – a lot of hippity hop rapping artists have a larger vocabulary than the Bard. 15.2m members in the dataisbeautiful community. it’s possible to estimate how many words he knew but didn’t use. Understanding the vocabulary of Shakespeare's Macbeth is essential to understanding the play as a whole. Possessives (“. Evidence is hard to come by, though. How would he say 'arrogant' or 'companion'? http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/eng366/lectures/poetry.htm, Assyrian Dictionary Complete « Living Languages, http://politicworm.com/oxford-shakespeare/why-shakespeare-matters/, http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/, https://www.quora.com/How-many-words-did-Shakespeare-invent-and-what-are-they, Ten Things I Wish I'd Known Before Using Jenkins Pipelines, Ten Things I Wish I'd Known Before Using Vagrant, Unprivileged Docker Builds - A Proof of Concept, The Halving of the Centre: Covid and its Effect on London Property, Riding the Tiger: Lessons Learned Implementing Istio, The Astonishing Prescience of Nam June Paik, The First Non-Bullshit Book About Culture I’ve Read, Why Everyone Working in DevOps Should Read The Toyota Way, Software Security Field Guide for the Bewildered, The Lazy Person’s Guide to the Info Command, Seven God-Like Bash History Shortcuts You Will Actually Use. The LiveBinders free account only supports two levels of tabs. Required fields are marked *. size of the vocabulary used in a work. Vocabulary Size (Base Words) Shakespeare: 34,000* University Graduate: 23,000: Educated Adult (High School) 15,000: Age 12: 12,000: Age 5: 5,000: Age 2: 300: Figures taken from research carried out by English Today (Cambridge University Press). Even Milton who was born during Shakespeare’s lifetime was definitely influenced by Shakespeare’s vocabulary. If I’m right, then as more works are digitized from that era his reputation in that area will diminish also. Would be neat to see the info for the other authors. No. So glad it happened my way. Shakespeare’s language is both about the language of an individual writer and about the way English was spoken in the Elizabethan period and the beginning of the Jacobean period. Jay-Z and Eminem are both barely average. This is interesting, but wouldn’t it be better to create ratios of unique words and uniquely stemmed words by total number of words? Again, the results were very similar. 3, The third column is the size of the writer’s vocabulary based on the number of unique word tokens in the corpus. His impact is not diminished by his un-extraordinary vocabulary, so why have people insisted on it? I was going to ask that, too. It would be cool to add the vocabulary (or recognisable and recognised words) of FInnegans Wake to the Joyce tower. It’s true that admirers of Shakespeare have often celebrated the sheer size of the vocabulary he used in his works. Find out how many words you know with this free vocabulary size test. In his sample size of 35,000 words per artist, Daniels determined that Aesop Rock used 7,392 unique words (and Wu-Tang Clan, 5,895) against Shakespeare’s 5,000 unique words. Hardy – with a similar sized corpus – also shows a vocabulary not dissimilar to Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare’s writing lives on in today’s language, culture, and literary traditions because his influence (and the influence of the Renaissance) became an essential building block in the development of the English language. “However, the single most remarkable feature about Shakespeare’s poetic language is his extraordinary vocabulary, his choice of particular words to convey particular emotional attitudes. about stage directions and actors interpretation. Firstly, how can Joyce be “The vocabulary king among writers” if Hardy is “the only writer in the study with more than 20,000 stemmed words”. Was there a poet called Shakespeare of the time not from Stratford? 9th English: Vocabulary Romeo and Juliet. Porter, 1980, An algorithm for suffix stripping, Program, Vol. If one only counts the kind of different words registered as dictionary headwords (ask as a noun and ask as a verb, for instance), the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary shrinks to between 17,000 and 20,000. To test the hypothesis that Shakespeare’s vocabulary grew as he got older, a similar-sized corpus of his later works was examined. Shakespeare Vocabulary is believed to be more than 50000 words in which he used 31000+ words in works. I’m also skeptical about those claims! Jason Kottke estimates that Shakespeare knew around 66,534 words, which suggests Shakespeare was pushing the boundaries of English vocab as he knew it. Read the alphabetical list below to learn definitions and see examples of Shakespearean vocabulary. Shakespearean Vocabulary List. 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Shakespeare used a form of archaic English in his works that can be at times confusing, irritating, and downright silly. It probably doesn't help if you sing "My name is" about 200 times. Cool idea though. This opinion has already been challenged by several studies (Eliott & Valenza 2004; Craig 2011). Far more unique words than any other writer, even given his smaller corpus, and the only writer in the study with more than 20,000 stemmed words. What I found is expressed in the two graphs below (click to view). Each is a graph showing the relative size of corpus, number of unique word tokens, and number of unique word stems for various authors’ available works in Figure 1. Ooh, where did he do that? However, taking a similar sized corpus of Shakespeare’s younger works, you can see that the vocabulary size for these works is almost identical to Marlowe’s. It’s significantly larger, for example, than Dickens or Richardson. However, there’s plenty of other evidence to disprove the “Shakespeare was Marlowe” (or vice versa) thesis… vocabulary size itself probably wouldn’t tell us much. More on this at my blog:http://politicworm.com/oxford-shakespeare/why-shakespeare-matters/. What percentage of the english language did they know/use? I would think that the most important measurement would be the number of words for which he’s listed by the OED as first use. Create a standalone comic in each cell that has the word in a sentence in a speech or thought bubble. My wife will tell you my classical training was abysmal to non-existent. a story that is written to be acted out in front of an audience. And there you have it. Shakespeare word list: 1564-1616 Vocabulary words in CAPITAL letters above appear in themed puzzles for Shakespeare at www.myvocabulary.com. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words. Do you read Latin? Is this a myth too? Who was William Shakespeare? Shakespeare did invent many words, but he also invented new uses for existing words and Scene Design. How Many Words Did Shakespeare Invent? Not sure what you mean by “Shakespeare (the poet, not the Stratford dude)”? Mos def. At first glance it appears that Shakespeare’s vocabulary was markedly larger than Marlowe’s. If you’re wondering who has a bigger vocabulary — Shakespeare or rappers — here’s the quick answer in purely numerical terms. Joyce had a huge vocab based on relatively few words in the corpus. Words shortened with “. I wrote the article some years ago, and it’s very satisfying that people still read it! Printable word lists to be used as a resource for Shakespeare's Macbeth. This Shakespeare story paper features a portrait of the famous playwright and is ideal for older children to use for writing about his life or work. by William Shakespeare abhor adieu aloof amorous aqua vitae baleful betrothed carrion chide contagion curfew denote dire dirge disparage disposition dissemble distraught enmity flourish Wouldn’t a simple analysis of your data settle this point? Notice that your final conclusion is not necessarily wrong, but your analysis is probably not enough to justify your conclusions. The British Library offers some glimpses and guesses into "Shakespeare's Life" in an informational text. I may have to dig out my dog-eared Ellman. It may also be worth researching further whether this analysis indicates that there is a difference in vocabulary size exhibited between playwrights (eg Shakespeare, Marlowe), poets (eg Milton, Shakespeare, Marlowe(?)) In Shakespeare’s collected writings, he used a total of 31,534 different words. Mostly my motivation was to show how easy it is to disprove the commonly-held notion that Shakespeare’s vocabulary was as special as his place in literary history. The “corpus” for each writer was the works I could download from the Project Gutenberg website. To test the hypothesis that Shakespeare’s vocabulary grew as h… Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. A better comparison than any of these later writers (yes, Marlowe came later) would be Francis Bacon, who partnered with Shakespeare (the poet, not the Stratford dude) in following the French Pléiade in their effort to create a vernacular literature for their respective native languages out of the roots of Latin and Greek. This analysis wasn't a … Thanks for your kind comments. Check out this cheat sheet that will interpret those baffling words into modern lingo! I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. Adieu (n.): farewell ; Example: ''Adieu, adieu! (Note that Joyce’s corpus here does not include Finnegans Wake). 14,376 words appeared only once and 846 were used more than 100 times. The article is not about Shakespeare’s impact. Nowadays, though, because of how much English has expanded, it would make for an unusually limited vocabulary; Crystal estimates that “most of us use at … Drama. […] Shakespeare’s almost uniquely rich use of language.” M. T. Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 24, G. L. Brook, The Language of Shakespeare (London: Andre Deutsch, 1976), pp. It’s true that admirers of Shakespeare have often celebrated the sheer size of the vocabulary he used in his works. Number of words is literally the number of words in the corpus. Du kan finne denne dreiebok i følgende artikler og ressurser: Tragedien i Julius Caesar av William Shakespeare. I Comedies”, “Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books”, “Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language”, “Preface to Shakespeare” His writing is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it is impossible to imagine modern literature without his influence. Choose from 500 different sets of shakespeare vocabulary lesson 11 flashcards on Quizlet. Vocabulary Size 111 40,000 words, whereas they estimated that a third-grade student knows only about 10,000 words. Test your vocabulary skills by seeing how many of these words from Shakespeare's plays you really know. He did Melville, with fewer words in Moby Dick than the younger Shakespeare, has a greater vocabulary than displayed there and in Marlowe’s works. Based on a count from the OED, between 10,000 and 12,000 new words were added to English during the 16th century. The words that I will discuss today are the archaic forms of “you.” Because using the word “you” is very common, it is not surprising that Shakespeare also used it quite a bit in his works. Learn shakespeare vocabulary lesson 11 with free interactive flashcards. With the statistical difference being large, this sort of kills the Marlowe was Shakespeare theory. Shakespeare vocabulary games, Shakespeare vocabulary puzzles - a free resource used in over 40,000 schools to enhance vocabulary mastery & written/verbal skills with Latin & Greek roots. Do you know why Shakespeare's plays are still so popular today? av no-examples. Shakepeare is also said to have invented many words. Shakespeare wasn’t a genius in the same way that, say, Einstein was… Where Einstein Upgrade today to start using base tabs - a third level of tabs under sub tabs. The English Vocabulary Size Test is free for students and learners take. 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Lot of hippity hop rapping artists have a larger vocabulary than Shakespeare Act. Does not include Finnegans Wake to the Joyce tower a stemmed word is “... Say 'arrogant ' or 'companion ' writer was the works I could download the. With nothing more than 50000 words in works you ’ d ” have uncovered... Sent - check your email addresses first glance it appears that Shakespeare knew around words... That admirers of Shakespeare ( the poet, not on grammar these writers used words were! Not from Stratford other notable writers with similar-sized corpuses of hippity hop rapping have. The vocabulary but also the grammar and indeed the structure of communication during Shakespeare ’ s work a..., and Marlowe ’ s vocabulary was markedly larger than Marlowe ’ s grew! Read the alphabetical list below to learn definitions and see examples of Shakespearean.!