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? He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before-unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English. He
( Bill Bryson )
[ Shakespeare: The World as ]
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