written during his most productive and inventive period—Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear—neologisms occur at the fairly astonishing rate of one every two and a half lines. Hamlet alone gave audiences about six hundred words that, according to all other evidence, they had never heard before. Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?
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