A history of the English Language

172.
The Movement Illustrated in Shakespeare.
It is a well-known fact that, except for a man like the Elizabethan translator Philemon 
Holland, Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer. This is due not 
only to his daring and resourceful use of words but also in part to his ready acceptance of 
new words of every kind. It is true that he could make sport of the inkhorn terms of a 
pedant like Holofernes, who quotes Latin, affects words like 
intimation, insinuation, 
explication,
and 
replication,
and has a high scorn for anyone like the slow-witted Dull 
who, as another character remarks, “hath not eat paper.” Shakespeare had not read 
Wilson in vain (see p. 218). But he was also not greatly impressed by Wilson’s extreme 
views. Among Shakespearian words are found 
agile, allurement, antipathy, catastrophe, 
consonancy, critical, demonstrate, dire, discountenance, emphasis, emulate, 
expostulation, extract, hereditary, horrid, impertinency, meditate, modest, pathetical, 
prodigious, vast,
the Romance words 
ambuscado, armada, barricade, bastinado, 
cavalier, mutiny, palisado, pell-mell, renegado
—all new to English in the latter half of 
the sixteenth century. Some of the words Shakespeare uses must have been very new 
indeed, because the earliest instance in which we find them at all is only a year or two 
before he uses them (e.g., 
exist, initiate, jovial
), and in a number of cases his is the 
earliest occurrence of the word in English (
accommodation, apostrophe, assassination, 
dexterously, dislocate, frugal, indistinguishable, misanthrope, obscene, pedant, 
premeditated, reliance, submerged,
etc.). He would no doubt have been classed among 
the liberals in his attitude toward foreign borrowing. Shakespeare’s use of the new words 
illustrates an important point in connection with them. This is the fact that they were 
often used, upon their first introduction, in a sense different from ours, closer to their 
etymological meaning in Latin. Thus, 
to communicate
nowadays means to exchange 
information, but in Shakespeare’s day it generally preserved its original meaning ‘to 
share or make common to many’. This is its force when Adriana says in the 
Comedy of 
Errors:
The renaissance, 1500-1650 217

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Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness married to thy stronger state 
Makes me with thy strength to 
communicate,
that is, she shares his strength with him. When Lorenzo in the 
Merchant of Venice
says 
“let’s in and there 
expect
their coming,” he is using 
expect
in its original sense of ‘to 
await’. In the sixteenth century, when the verb to atone was first used, it did not have its 
modern meaning, ‘to make amends’ but simply ‘to set at one, reconcile’, as when 
Desdemona says, “I would do much to atone them.” 
Enlargement
meant freedom from 
confinement (“take this key, give 
enlargement
to the swain”) and 
humorous
might mean 
‘damp’ (as in “the 
humorous
night” of 
Romeo and Juliet
) or ‘capricious’, ‘moody’, 
‘peevish’, that is, showing the effect of the various bodily humors which, according to 
medieval belief, determined one’s disposition. The word did not acquire its present 
meaning until the time of Addison. It would be easy to multiply examples from almost 
any page of Shakespeare. The few that have been given will suffice to show that the new 
words often remained close to their etymological meaning.