Over four hundred years ago, Shakespeare had a vocabulary of at least twenty one thousand different words: some have estimated that with the combination of words,this could have reached thirty thousand. Comparisons are entertaining:the King James Bible of 1611 used about ten thousand different words. The average educated man today, more than four hundred years on from Shakespeare with the advantage of the hundreds of thousands of new words that have come in since his time, has a working vocabulary of less than half that of Shakespeare.
The language at that time was in flux: Shakespeare must have made it dizzy. He out-Heroded Herod; uncle me no uncle,he said he would dog them at the heels-just one of the astonishing, simple transferences of a common observation,a dog at someone 's heels, into a phrase which could be menacing, funny, admirable,pestering: and it is clinchingly memorable.
Shakespeare shoved into bed together words that scarcely knew each other before, had never even been introduced. He coupled 'ill 'with 'tuned'- Ill-tuned it was and is and ever more shall be. Baby suddenly found itself hitched to eyes and baby-eyes hit the page. Smooth, unaware of its new mate,was joined with faced and the smooth-faced appeared among us. Puppy met dog. In the sixteenth century people began to start their sentences with oh, why and well as pray, prithee and marry began to die off. Shakespeare was on to them. Almost every word could be used as almost and part of speech. There were no rules and Shakespeare 's English ran riot.