Shakespeares vocabulary was pretty incredible, even if he did sometimes have to resort to making up words. But its hard to comprehend just how vast it was without looking at the figures. In an era without dictionaries, Shakespeare used more than 17,000 different words, four times as many as an educated man would be expected to know in the period. He invented nearly 3,000. Most remarkably though, he used 7,000 words just once. Thats once in his entire body of work, not just one play. Thats more words than his contemporaries were expected to know in total. Or, to put it another way, thats more words than there are in the entirety of the King James Bible.
