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.