The Man Who Coined 1,700 Words: Shakespeare by the Numbers

No writer has ever dominated a language the way one glover's son from Stratford dominates English. Four hundred years after his death, he is still the most performed playwright on Earth, the most quoted author in the dictionary, and — by the Oxford English Dictionary's own citations — the recorded introducer of a startling share of the words we use daily. Here is the greatest literary career ever, told in numbers.

The catalogue

• 39 plays (scholars' counts run 37–39 as collaborations are confirmed), written in roughly 25 years.
• 154 sonnets, plus two long narrative poems that were his era's bestsellers.
• Roughly 900,000 words of surviving text — containing a working vocabulary of over 20,000 different words, one of the largest ever deployed by a single author.
• Around 1,700 words first recorded in his works, by the traditional OED-based count: assassination, lonely, bedroom, swagger, gloomy, majestic, eyeball. Caution is owed — "first recorded" is not proof he invented each one — but no other writer is the dictionary's first witness so often, by such a margin.
• Countless phrases now spoken by people who have never read him: "wild-goose chase," "heart of gold," "break the ice," "the world's mine oyster," "in a pickle."

The performance records

He is, by any accounting, the most performed dramatist in history: his plays are staged professionally on every inhabited continent every year, and Hamlet alone is estimated to be in performance somewhere on Earth at virtually every moment. His works have been translated into more than a hundred languages — a total among authors exceeded only in our census of the most translated writers ever — and adapted into over a thousand films and television productions, more than any other author, living or dead.

The mysterious economy of genius

The numbers hide a paradox: for all this output, the documentary trace of the man is thin — a few signatures, business records, a will leaving his wife the "second best bed." Into that gap has poured four centuries of speculation, including the perennial authorship conspiracy theories, which mainstream scholarship has examined and dismissed: the contemporary evidence naming Shakespeare as author is, by early-modern standards, abundant.

"To thine own self be true."

— William Shakespeare

The strangest statistic

Perhaps the most arresting number is zero — the number of his play manuscripts that survive in his own hand (a few disputed pages of Sir Thomas More possibly excepted). Everything rests on the 1623 First Folio, assembled by his colleagues seven years after his death. Eighteen plays, Macbeth and The Tempest among them, appear there for the first time: without that single book, half the canon would simply not exist. Around 235 copies survive; one sold in 2020 for $9.98 million, the most ever paid for a work of literature at auction.

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The record that grows

Most records erode. Shakespeare's compound: every year adds productions, translations, adaptations and citations faster than any living writer accumulates them. He shares a death-date curiosity with Miguel de Cervantes — a story we tell among history's strangest coincidences — but no one shares his scoreboard. Four hundred years on, the gap is still widening.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many words did Shakespeare invent?

He is the first recorded user of roughly 1,700 words in the OED's traditional count — though 'first recorded' does not prove he coined each one.

How many plays did Shakespeare write?

Between 37 and 39, depending on how collaborations are counted, plus 154 sonnets and two narrative poems.

Do any Shakespeare manuscripts survive?

Essentially none in his own hand — the canon rests on the 1623 First Folio, published by his colleagues seven years after his death.