Frequently Asked Questions
What is a word search?
A word search is a puzzle where there are rows of letters placed in the shape of a square, and there are words written forwards, backwards, horizontal, vertical or diagonal. There will be a list of words for the player to look for and the goal of the player is to find those words hidden in the word search puzzle, and highlight them.
How do I choose the words to use in my word search?
Once you’ve picked a theme, choose words that have a variety of different lengths, difficulty levels and letters. You don’t need to worry about trying to fit the words together with each other because WordMint will do that for you!
How are word searches used in the classroom?
Word search games are an excellent tool for teachers, and an excellent resource for students. They help to encourage wider vocabulary, as well as testing cognitive abilities and pattern-finding skills.
Because the word search templates are completely custom, you can create suitable word searches for children in kindergarten, all the way up to college students.
Who is a word search suitable for?
One of the common word search faq’s is whether there is an age limit or what age kids can start doing word searches. The fantastic thing about word search exercises is, they are completely flexible for whatever age or reading level you need.
Word searches can use any word you like, big or small, so there are literally countless combinations that you can create for templates. It is easy to customise the template to the age or learning level of your students.
How do I create a word search template?
For the easiest word search templates, WordMint is the way to go!
Pre-made templates
For a quick an easy pre-made template, simply search through WordMint’s existing 500,000+ templates. With so many to choose from, you’re bound to find the right one for you!
Create your own from scratch
- Log in to your account (it’s free to join!)
- Head to ‘My Puzzles’
- Click ‘Create New Puzzle’ and select ‘Word Search’
- Select your layout, enter your title and your chosen words
- That’s it! The template builder will create your word search template for you and you can save it to your account, export as a Word document or PDF and print!
How can I print my word search template?
All of our templates can be exported into Microsoft Word to easily print, or you can save your work as a PDF to print for the entire class. Your puzzles get saved into your account for easy access and printing in the future, so you don’t need to worry about saving them at work or at home!
Can I create a word search in other languages?
Word searches are a fantastic resource for students learning a foreign language as it tests their reading comprehension skills in a fun, engaging way.
We have full support for word search templates in Spanish, French and Japanese with diacritics including over 100,000 images.
William Shakespeare, the ____ English dramatist and ____, ____ born in 1564 in Stratford, a small country ____ on the river Avon not ____ from London. He was the ____ of John, a glover, and Mary Arden.Shakespeare probably ____ to Stratford Grammar School but he ____ no university education. He ____ Anne Hathaway when he was only ____ years old, and in 1585 he ____ his native town for London. A traditional ____ tells that he had to run away to avoid arrest for deer-stealing.
We do not know ____ about his life in London. All we ____ for certain is that by 1592 he had become a well-known actor and one of the most ____ dramatists in Elizabethan London. He acted at court and won the admiration of Queen ____ I.
He ____ great fortune, which enabled him to ____ a large house in Stratford, where he ____ the last years of his life and where he ____ in 1616.
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William Shakespeare used more than 20,000 words in his plays and poems, and his works provide the first recorded use of over 1,700 words in the English language. It is believed that he may have invented or introduced many of these words himself, often by combining words, changing nouns into verbs, adding prefixes or suffixes, and so on. Some words stuck around and some didn’t.
Although lexicographers are continually discovering new origins and earliest usages of words, below are listed words and definitions we still use today that are widely attributed to Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s Words A-Z
Alligator: (n) a large, carnivorous reptile closely related to the crocodile
Romeo and Juliet, Act 5 Scene 1
Bedroom: (n) a room for sleeping; furnished with a bed
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 2
Critic: (n) one who judges merit or expresses a reasoned opinion
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 3 Scene 1
Downstairs: (adv) on a lower floor; down the steps
Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 4
Eyeball: (n) the round part of the eye; organ for vision
Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 7
Fashionable: (adj) stylish; characteristic of a particular period
Troilus and Cressida, Act 3 Scene 3
Gossip: (v) to talk casually, usually about others
The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1
Hurry: (v) to act or move quickly
The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1
Inaudible: (adj) not heard; unable to be heard
All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 5 Scene 3
Jaded: (adj) worn out; bored or past feeling
Henry VI Part 2, Act 4 Scene 1
Kissing: (ppl adj) touching with the lips; exchanging kisses
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 5 Scene 2
Lonely: (adj) feeling sad due to lack of companionship
Coriolanus, Act 4 Scene 1
Manager: (n) one who controls or administers; person in charge
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 1 Scene 2
Nervy: (adj) sinewy or strong; bold; easily agitated
Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 1
Obscene: (adj) repulsive or disgusting; offensive to one’s morality
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 1 Scene 1
Puppy dog: (n) a young, domestic dog
King John, Act 2 Scene 1
Questioning: (n) the act of inquiring or interrogating
As You Like It, Act 5 Scene 4
Rant: (v) to speak at length in inflated or extravagant language
Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1
Skim milk: (n) milk with its cream removed
Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 3
Traditional: (adj) conventional; long-established, bound by tradition
Richard III, Act 3 Scene 1
Undress: (v) to remove clothes or other covering
The Taming of the Shrew, Induction Scene 2
Varied: (adj) incorporating different types or kinds; diverse
Titus Andronicus, Act 3 Scene 1
Worthless: (adj) having no value or merit; contemptible
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 4 Scene 2
Xantippe: (n) shrewish wife of Socrates; figuratively, a bad-tempered woman
The Taming of the Shrew, Act 1 Scene 2
Yelping: (adj) uttering sharp, high-pitched cries
Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 2
Zany: (n) clown’s assistant; performer who mimics another’s antics
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 5 Scene 2
Inventors get a lot of love. Thomas Edison is held up as a tinkering genius. Steve Jobs is considered a saint in Silicon Valley. Hedy Lamar, meanwhile, may have been a Hollywood star but a new book makes clear her real legacy is in inventing the foundations of encryption. But while all these people invented things, it’s possible to invent something even more fundamental. Take Shakespeare: he invented words. And he invented more words—words that continue to shape the English language—than anyone else. By a long shot.
But what does it mean to “invent” words? How many words did Shakespeare invent? What kind of words? And which words are those exactly? Rather than just listing all the words Shakespeare invented, this post digs deeper into the how and the why (or “wherefore”) of Shakespeare’s literary creations.
How Many Words Did Shakespeare Invent?
1700! My, what a perfectly round number! Such a large and perfectly round number is misleading at best, and is more likely just wrong—there is in fact a bunch of debate about the accuracy of this number.
So who’s to blame for the uncertainty around the number of words Shakespeare invented? For starters, we can blame the Oxford English Dictionary. This famous dictionary (often called the OED for short) is famous, in part, because it provides incredibly thorough definitions of words, but also because it identifies the first time each word actually appeared in written English. Shakespeare appears as the first documented user of more words than any other writer, making it convenient to assume that he was the creator of all of those words.
In reality, though, many of these words were probably part of everyday discourse in Elizabethan England. So it’s highly likely that Shakespeare didn’t invent all of these words; he just produced the first preserved record of some of them. Ryan Buda, a writer at Letterpile, explains it like this:
But most likely, the word was in use for some time before it is seen in the writings of Shakespeare. The fact that the word first appears there does not necessarily mean that he made it up himself, but rather, he could have borrowed it from his peers or from conversations he had with others.
However, while Shakespeare might have been just the first person to write down some words, he definitely did create many words himself, plenty of which we still use to this day. The list a ways down below contains the 420 words that almost certainly originated from Shakespeare himself.
But all this leads to another question. What does it even mean to “invent” a word?
How Did Shakespeare Invent Words?
Some writers invent words in the same way Thomas Edison invented light bulbs: they cobble together bits of sound and create entirely new words without any meaning or relation to existing words. Lewis Carroll does in the first stanza of his “Jabberwocky” poem:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Carroll totally made up words like “brillig,” “slithy,” “toves,” and “mimsy”; the first stanza alone contains 11 of these made-up words, which are known as nonce words. Words like these aren’t just meaningless, they’re also disposable, intended to be used just once.
Shakespeare did not create nonce words. He took an entirely different approach. When he invented words, he did it by working with existing words and altering them in new ways. More specifically, he would create new words by:
- Conjoining two words
- Changing verbs into adjectives
- Changing nouns into verbs
- Adding prefixes to words
- Adding suffixes to words
The most exhaustive take on Shakespeare’s invented words comes from a nice little 874-page book entitled The Shakespeare Key by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. Here’s how they explain Shakespeare’s literary innovations:
Shakespeare, with the right and might of a true poet, and with his peculiar royal privilege as king of all poets, has minted several words that deserve to become current in our language. He coined them for his own special use to express his own special meanings in his own special passages; but they are so expressive and so well framed to be exponents of certain particulars in meanings common to us all, that they deserve to become generally adopted and used.
We can call what Shakespeare did to create new words “minting,” “coining” or “inventing.” Whatever term we use to describe it, Shakespeare was doing things with words that no one had ever thought to do before, and that’s what matters.
Shakespeare Didn’t Invent Nonsense Words
Though today readers often need the help of modern English translations to fully grasp the nuance and meaning of Shakespeare’s language, Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would have had a much easier go of it. Why? Two main reasons.
First, Shakespeare was part of a movement in English literature that introduced more prose into plays. (Earlier plays were written primarily in rhyming verse.) Shakespeare’s prose was similar to the style and cadence of everyday conversation in Elizabethan England, making it natural for members of his audience to understand.
In addition, the words he created were comprehensible intuitively because, once again, they were often built on the foundations of already existing words, and were not just unintelligible combinations of sound. Take “congreeted” for example. The prefix “con” means with, and “greet” means to receive or acknowledge someone.
It therefore wasn’t a huge stretch for people to understand this line:
That, face to face and royal eye to eye.
You have congreeted.(Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare also made nouns into verbs. He was the first person to use friend as a verb, predating Mark Zuckerberg by about 395 years.
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)
Other times, despite his proclivity for making compound words, Shakespeare reached into his vast Latin vocabulary for loanwords.
His heart fracted and corroborate.
(Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1)
Here the Latin word fractus means “broken.” Take away the –us and add in the English suffix –ed, and a new English word is born.
New Words Are Nothing New
Shakespeare certainly wasn’t the first person to make up words. It’s actually entirely commonplace for new words to enter a language. We’re adding new words and terms to our “official” dictionaries every year. In the past few years, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has added several new words and phrases, like these:
- bokeh
- elderflower
- fast fashion
- first world problem
- ginger
- microaggression
- mumblecore
- pareidolia
- ping
- safe space
- wayback
- wayback machine
- woo-woo
So inventing words wasn’t something unique to Shakespeare or Elizabethan England. It’s still going on all the time.
But Shakespeare Invented a Lot of New Words
So why did Shakespeare have to make up hundreds of new words? For starters, English was smaller in Shakespeare’s time. The language contained many fewer words, and not enough for a literary genius like Shakespeare. How many words? No one can be sure. One estimates, one from Encyclopedia Americana, puts the number at 50,000-60,000, likely not including medical and scientific terms.
During Shakespeare’s time, the number of words in the language began to grow. Edmund Weiner, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains it this way:
The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for this purpose. Others advocated the revival of obsolete words and the adoption of regional dialect.
In Shakespeare’s collected writings, he used a total of 31,534 different words. Whatever the size of the English lexicon at the time, Shakespeare was in command of a substantial portion of it. Jason Kottke estimates that Shakespeare knew around 66,534 words, which suggests Shakespeare was pushing the boundaries of English vocab as he knew it. He had to make up some new words.
The Complete List of Words Shakespeare Invented
Compiling a definitive list of every word that Shakespeare ever invented is impossible. But creating a list of the words that Shakespeare almost certainly invented can be done. We generated list of words below by starting with the words that Shakespeare was the first to use in written language, and then applying research that has identified which words were probably in everyday use during Shakespeare’s time. The result are 420 bona fide words minted, coined, and invented by Shakespeare, from “academe” to “zany”:
- academe
- accessible
- accommodation
- addiction
- admirable
- aerial
- airless
- amazement
- anchovy
- arch-villain
- auspicious
- bacheolorship
- barefaced
- baseless
- batty
- beachy
- bedroom
- belongings
- birthplace
- black-faced
- bloodstained
- bloodsucking
- blusterer
- bodikins
- braggartism
- brisky
- broomstaff
- budger
- bump
- buzzer
- candle holder
- catlike
- characterless
- cheap
- chimney-top
- chopped
- churchlike
- circumstantial
- clangor
- cold-blooded
- coldhearted
- compact
- consanguineous
- control
- coppernose
- countless
- courtship
- critical
- cruelhearted
- Dalmatian
- dauntless
- dawn
- day’s work
- deaths-head
- defeat
- depositary
- dewdrop
- dexterously
- disgraceful
- distasteful
- distrustful
- dog-weary
- doit (a Dutch coin: ‘a pittance’)
- domineering
- downstairs
- dwindle
- East Indies
- embrace
- employer
- employment
- enfranchisement
- engagement
- enrapt
- epileptic
- equivocal
- eventful
- excitement
- expedience
- expertness
- exposure
- eyedrop
- eyewink
- fair-faced
- fairyland
- fanged
- fap
- far-off
- farmhouse
- fashionable
- fashionmonger
- fat-witted
- fathomless
- featureless
- fiendlike
- fitful
- fixture
- fleshment
- flirt-gill
- flowery
- fly-bitten
- footfall
- foppish
- foregone
- fortune-teller
- foul mouthed
- Franciscan
- freezing
- fretful
- full-grown
- fullhearted
- futurity
- gallantry
- garden house
- generous
- gentlefolk
- glow
- go-between
- grass plot
- gravel-blind
- gray-eyed
- green-eyed
- grief-shot
- grime
- gust
- half-blooded
- heartsore
- hedge-pig
- hell-born
- hint
- hobnail
- homely
- honey-tongued
- hornbook
- hostile
- hot-blooded
- howl
- hunchbacked
- hurly
- idle-headed
- ill-tempered
- ill-used
- impartial
- imploratory
- import
- in question
- inauspicious
- indirection
- indistinguishable
- inducement
- informal
- inventorially
- investment
- invitation
- invulnerable
- jaded
- juiced
- keech
- kickie-wickie
- kitchen-wench
- lackluster
- ladybird
- lament
- land-rat
- laughable
- leaky
- leapfrog
- lewdster
- loggerhead
- lonely
- long-legged
- love letter
- lustihood
- lustrous
- madcap
- madwoman
- majestic
- malignancy
- manager
- marketable
- marriage bed
- militarist
- mimic
- misgiving
- misquote
- mockable
- money’s worth
- monumental
- moonbeam
- mortifying
- motionless
- mountaineer
- multitudinous
- neglect
- never-ending
- newsmonger
- nimble-footed
- noiseless
- nook-shotten
- obscene
- ode
- offenseful
- offenseless
- Olympian
- on purpose
- oppugnancy
- outbreak
- overblown
- overcredulous
- overgrowth
- overview
- pageantry
- pale-faced
- passado
- paternal
- pebbled
- pedant
- pedantical
- pendulous
- pignut
- pious
- please-man
- plumpy
- posture
- prayerbook
- priceless
- profitless
- Promethean
- protester
- published
- puking (disputed)
- puppy-dog
- pushpin
- quarrelsome
- radiance
- rascally
- rawboned
- reclusive
- refractory
- reinforcement
- reliance
- remorseless
- reprieve
- resolve
- restoration
- restraint
- retirement
- revokement
- revolting
- ring carrier
- roadway
- roguery
- rose-cheeked
- rose-lipped
- rumination
- ruttish
- sanctimonious
- satisfying
- savage
- savagery
- schoolboy
- scrimer
- scrubbed
- scuffle
- seamy
- self-abuse
- shipwrecked
- shooting star
- shudder
- silk stocking
- silliness
- skim milk
- skimble-skamble
- slugabed
- soft-hearted
- spectacled
- spilth
- spleenful
- sportive
- stealthy
- stillborn
- successful
- suffocating
- tanling
- tardiness
- time-honored
- title page
- to arouse
- to barber
- to bedabble
- to belly
- to besmirch
- to bet
- to bethump
- to blanket
- to cake
- to canopy
- to castigate
- to cater
- to champion
- to comply
- to compromise
- to cow
- to cudgel
- to dapple
- to denote
- to dishearten
- to dislocate
- to educate
- to elbow
- to enmesh
- to enthrone
- to fishify
- to glutton
- to gnarl
- to gossip
- to grovel
- to happy
- to hinge
- to humor
- to impede
- to inhearse
- to inlay
- to instate
- to lapse
- to muddy
- to negotiate
- to numb
- to offcap
- to operate
- to out-Herod
- to out-talk
- to out-villain
- to outdare
- to outfrown
- to outscold
- to outsell
- to outweigh
- to overpay
- to overpower
- to overrate
- to palate
- to pander
- to perplex
- to petition
- to rant
- to reverb
- to reword
- to rival
- to sate
- to secure
- to sire
- to sneak
- to squabble
- to subcontract
- to sully
- to supervise
- to swagger
- to torture
- to un muzzle
- to unbosom
- to uncurl
- to undervalue
- to undress
- to unfool
- to unhappy
- to unsex
- to widen
- tortive
- traditional
- tranquil
- transcendence
- trippingly
- unaccommodated
- unappeased
- unchanging
- unclaimed
- unearthy
- uneducated
- unfrequented
- ungoverned
- ungrown
- unhelpful
- unhidden
- unlicensed
- unmitigated
- unmusical
- unpolluted
- unpublished
- unquestionable
- unquestioned
- unreal
- unrivaled
- unscarred
- unscratched
- unsolicited
- unsullied
- unswayed
- untutored
- unvarnished
- unwillingness
- upstairs
- useful
- useless
- valueless
- varied
- varletry
- vasty
- vulnerable
- watchdog
- water drop
- water fly
- well-behaved
- well-bred
- well-educated
- well-read
- wittolly
- worn out
- wry-necked
- yelping
- zany
Words That Shakespeare Invented – Resource List
- 10 Words Shakespeare Never Invented – Merriam-Webster does a great job dismantling myths. This article, in particular, tells you which words Shakespeare probably didn’t invent.
- 40 Words You Can Trace Back To William Shakespeare – Buzzfeed disregards the “never invented” words from Merriam, but does add a disclaimer: “That doesn’t necessarily mean he invented every word.”
- Invented Words – This page was the center of a disputatious brouhaha with the aforementioned Buzzfeed. As it stands, however, Google likes to deliver this as a top result when you search for “Words Shakespeare Invented.”
- 20 Words We Owe to Shakespeare – I like the way that the author of this article draws a parallel between Shakespeare and the LOL generation.
- Words and Phrases Coined by Shakespeare – This is a lengthy and straightforward list that mostly contains phrases rather than individual words.
- 21 everyday phrases that come straight from Shakespeare’s plays – This is a helpful resource due to the explanation of each phrase.
Words, words, words.
(Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2)