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William Shakespeare

Shakespeare Dictionary

A List of Troublesome Words

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By , Sept. 2003. Updated July 5, 2011.

This is an extremely selective and personal dictionary of troublesome words I have found in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. It is limited to words that have fallen out of use, OR whose meanings have changed over the centuries. "Power" is an excellent example of this second category; in Shakespeare, it normally refers to an army.

Other words, like "pelican" and "willow" have lost the strong symbolic meaning that they had in Shakespeare's vocabulary. Most modern readers (myself included) would need a dictionary of mythology to understand that "pelicans" allegedly pecked open their mothers' breasts to feed. One doesn't need a translator to read Shakespeare, but some guidance in his word meanings might be useful.

Words like 'store' usually mean the same thing they mean now, but sometimes mean something a little different. In the example, 'store' means 'material, substance, stuff', as opposed to 'a supply of stuff'. Subtly, but distinctly different.

Click here to generate random Shakespearean insults.

The table below shows Shakespeare's word, its meaning (in the sample quote), "#" - its relative frequency, reference(s) to the word's use in well-known plays, and a brief quote, in context. The middle column "#" is the number of times the word is found in Shakespeare (based on an Internet Shakespeare vocabulary list, not on exhaustive scholarly research). It is only shown to give a sense of how often the word appears.

Here is an example of the table shown on each page (for each letter of the alphabet):

Shakespeare's word

Meaning (in the sample quote)

#

Reference(s)

Sample quote

addition

title; epithet;


Anything added; increase; augmentation; an improvement

28

Lear 2.2;


Oth 3.4

if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition


And think it no addition, nor my wish, To have him see me woman'd.

Shakespeare Dictionary A-MThe most comprehensive work on this topic is Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon, a typical turn-of-the-century tome, carried out with Teutonic thoroughness. I wonder how the pre-computer-era scholars tackled projects like this; lots of index cards and infinite patience, I suppose.

Incredibly, the book lists EVERY instance of EVERY word, in context, found in the plays and sonnets. In any event, for anyone who really enjoys Shakespeare, it's fun to pore over this "volume of forgotten lore," read all the occurrences of "housewife", for example, and ponder the subtle differences of meaning from one usage to the next.

You can order the Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by Alexander Schmidt (a Dover re-print, 1985) from Amazon.com:

(Vol. 1 A-M)     (Vol. 2 N-Z)

You also might be interested reading about in Kurosawa's film versions of two Shakespearean plays: Throne of Blood, an adaptation of Macbeth, and Ran, modelled after King Lear.

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