He was an inventor of words, a neologismist. He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language. Apprehensible, beauteousness, bystander, criminalist, emancipation, enripen, fecundate, horridness, imbrothelled, jig. (And, for those who bristle against the loose use of ‘disinterested’ to mean ‘not interested’ rather than ‘lacking a vested interest’: Donne was the first to do so, and we must take it up with him.)
