How many words in Shakespeare?
Several sources claim that Shakespeare used nearly 30,000 different words in his works. However, we need to ask what we mean by “different words”. Is it reasonable to count go and going and gone as three different words? If we count go and going and gone as one word (GO), then Shakespeare used fewer than 20,000 “different words”.
Tags: english, shakespeare, Vocabulary, words
March 15th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
That’s food for thought. I personally would consider the words with the same root as one word when counting them in fiction.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:12 am
If this is food for thought, prepare for mental indigestion!
Does it really matter? Surely the artistic and creative inspiration and effect are what we should be interested in.
Some people obviously do not have enough to fill their time!