Did Shakespeare really invent 1,700 words?

Probably not all of them. One count says Shakespeare used 17,677 different words in his plays and poems, and that 1,700 of them appear first in his work. But the historian Jonathan Hope points out a catch: the Victorian volunteers who read old books for the first Oxford English Dictionary paid special attention to Shakespeare. They read him more thoroughly and cited him more often, so he is often credited with the first use of words that can in fact be found in other writers.

That does not make him a fraud. Shakespeare clearly did coin words, by turning nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, gluing words together, adding prefixes and suffixes, or inventing new ones outright. And his phrases are everywhere: "seen better days", "strange bedfellows", "with bated breath", "a foregone conclusion".

But he was riding a wave. In his time English was rapidly absorbing words from other languages through war, exploration, diplomacy and colonization, and writers like Spenser, Sidney and Marlowe were all inventing and borrowing words to express new ideas. Spelling and grammar were not yet fixed, so there was room to play.

The record keeping did the rest. Shakespeare became the most-quoted writer in the finished OED, just as Samuel Johnson had quoted him more than anyone in his own dictionary. Sometimes Shakespeare did not invent a phrase but made it famous: "mind's eye" did not originate in Hamlet, but his use of it popularized it. So the fairest answer is that Shakespeare invented many words, but our count is partly a portrait of who the dictionary makers chose to read most closely.