Guilty by Definition

by Susie Dent

William Shakespeare had certainly long been regarded as the bedrock of all historical dictionaries, the author credited with over thirty thousand first records of words and expressions, from the well-known “it’s all Greek to me” to less obvious coinages like “under-peep” and “crafty-sick.” It was undeniable that the playwright had been an exuberant experimenter with language, verbing furiously, dovetailing one word with another, and flipping the appearance and meaning of existing words to create something headily new. But it was also now acknowledged that some of his apparent inventions were almost certainly in use already, carried through the air in spoken English, where they were exchanged without ceremony or record. Shakespeare’s time had been one of lexical effusiveness, when language was springy and daring, producing words as modern sounding as “banana” and as steeped in time as “overmorrow.” The dictionary’s reliance on his work was largely due to his unparalleled literary status at the time when compilation began in earnest, leading to a bias among editors, many of whom were Shakespeare scholars. Each first record attributed to the playwright had become another brick in the Shakespeare edifice. Even his hapax legomena—words that lasted barely a day—were routinely given full legitimacy. The result of all this was that any discovery of an earlier record of a word currently credited to Shakespeare was held aloft as a triumph of word detection.