In his new book All in a Word, linguist Vivian Cook lists all the words that the literary titans Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare “invented”—or at least had the first recorded use.

Who do you think was the master neologist? Shakespeare or Chaucer? Flavorwire compiled a list of the terms (and highlighted their favorites) on the graphic below:

chaucer-vs-shakespeare

Comments (9)

9 Comments

aonghus
December 10th, 2010 | 10:20 am

Hardly a fair comparison, given that Chaucer had a few centuries of a head start.

pentamom
December 10th, 2010 | 12:26 pm

It’s hard to imagine the English speaking world doing without the word “desk” until the 13th century. I suppose there was some Latinate equivalent used? Or maybe some OE word that subsequently dropped into disuse because it hurt too much to say?

And that goes for a lot of Chaucer’s words — it’s mind-boggling that what seem such simple words were absent from the language.

J.W. Cox
December 10th, 2010 | 1:40 pm

Intriguing. I have to give this match to Team Chaucer, not for the greater number but for the nature of the words, in a sense “de novo.”

By contrast, Shakespeare here relies much more on constructions like “un-”, “in-”, “-less”, and “-ness” which seem to take *existing* words and modify them.

Assistant Village Idiot
December 10th, 2010 | 2:07 pm

Entertaining, but unreliable. With the uncertainty attending every entry, and in particular the significance of Chaucer’s writing in English at all (rather than French or Latin), and thus having a field ripe for harvest in “first use” measures, the list would only have meaning if one or the other were an order of magnitude greater.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON EDITION | ThePulp.it
December 10th, 2010 | 2:47 pm

[...] Literary Smackdown: Chaucer vs. Shakespeare – Joe Carter, First Thoughts [...]

Chris Baker
December 10th, 2010 | 3:06 pm

For your further consideration …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_first_attested_in_Chaucer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_influence#Vocabulary

N.B., Chaucer wrote in Middle English, while Shakspeare wrote in what’s usually considered Early Modern English. Folks who can read Shakespeare often have a difficult time reading Chaucer.

The Undisputed Master of Neologisming » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog
December 10th, 2010 | 3:51 pm

[...] forget that Chaucer versus Shakespeare stuff. Matt Anderson pointed me to an article that reveals our greatest word-maker to be none other [...]

shana
December 10th, 2010 | 4:20 pm

All that is well and good. Horray for new words.

What my teens love most about Chaucer is the erm—human wind and bottom jokes. They believe if all great literature was full of such, more great literature would be certain to be read.

Shakespeare is no slouch here, either…now, has someone done a comparison on that?

pentamom
December 10th, 2010 | 6:41 pm

It’s true, Chaucer does have the advantage of writing the first extended work of English literature (as opposed to legal or business documents.) And Chaucer also gets the “win” on coining the words for which there is now no common close substitute. Shakespeare’s words are mostly new, possibly more elegant or precise ways of saying things that there were presumably already quite sufficient ways of saying, that we still have. IOW, had Shakespeare not coined those words, our language would be less rich, but not less functional. But without “desk,” “accident,” or “add,” either we’d be using some rough Anglo-Saxon equivalent that we’ve since decided is less useful, or circumlocuting quite awkwardly to say very simple things.