“Household Words”
“Household Words”
Common and Uncommon Words Coined by Shakespeare
- gallantry (Shakespeare meant “gallant people”)
- garden house
- generous (Shakespeare meant “gentle,” “noble,” “fair”)
- gentlefolk
- glow (as a noun)
- to glutton
- to gnarl
- go-between
- to gossip (Shakespeare meant “to make oneself at home like a gossip-that is, a kindred spirit or fast friend”)
- grass plot
- gravel-blind (“almost stone-blind”)
- gray-eyed
- green-eyed
- grief-shot (“sorrow-stricken”)
- grime (as a noun)
- to grovel
- * gust (as “a wind-blast”)
- half-blooded
- to hand (Shakespeare meant “to handle”)
- to happy (“to gladden”)
- heartsore
- hedge-pig
- hell-born
- to hinge
- hint (the noun)
- hobnail (the noun)
- hodge-pudding (“a pudding of various ingredients”)
- * homely (in the sense of ugly”)
- honey-tongued
- hornbook (“alphabet tablet”)
- hostile
- hot-blooded
- howl (the noun)
- to humor
- hunchbacked [“bunch-back’d” in earliest edition]
- hurly (“commotion”)
- to hurry
- idle-headed
- ill-tempered
- ill-used
- impartial
- to impede
- implorator (“solicitor”)
- import (the noun: “importance,” “significance”)
- inaudible
- inauspicious
- indirection
- indistinguishable
- inducement
- informal (Shakespeare seems to have meant “unformed” or “irresolute”)
- to inhearse (“load into a hearse”)
- to inlay
- to instate (Shakespeare, who spelled it “enstate,” meant “to endow”)
- inventorially (“in detail”)
- investment (Shakespeare meant “a piece of clothing”)
- invitation
- invulnerable
- jaded (Shakespeare seems to have meant “contemptible”)
- juiced (“juicy”)
- keech (“solidified fat”)
- kickie-wickie (derogatory term for a wife)
- kitchen-wench
- lackluster
- ladybird
- lament
- land-rat
- to lapse
- laughable
- leaky
- leapfrog
- lewdster
- loggerhead (Shakespeare meant “blockhead”)
- lonely (Shakespeare meant “lone”)
- long-legged
- love letter
- to lower (Shakespeare meant both “to frown, to threaten” and “to sink, to decline”)
- lustihood
- lustrous
- madcap (as an adjective)
- madwoman [earlier than OED]
- majestic
- malignancy (Shakespeare meant “malign tendency”)
- manager
- marketable
- marriage bed
- marybud (“bud of a marigold”)
- mewling (“whining, whimpering”)
- militarist (Shakespeare meant “soldier”)
- mimic (the noun)
- misgiving (the noun: “uneasiness”)
- to misquote
- mockable (“deserving ridicule”)
- money’s worth [“money-worth” dates from the fourteenth century]
- monumental
- moonbeam
- mortifying (the adjective)
- motionless
- mountaineer (Shakespeare meant “mountain-dweller”)
- to muddy
- multipotent (“most-mighty”)
- multitudinous
- mutineer