Exactly how many words did William Shakespeare use in all of his plays combined?
Counts range from less than 20,000 to 30,000 depending on one’s definition of a word. If we count related words such as “walk, walks, and walking” as individual words, then Shakespeare used a vocabulary of about 30,000 words. However, if we see these as variations of a single word “walk,” then Shakespeare’s vocabulary drops to less than 20,000. This lower figure seems a more accurate indication of Shakespeare’s active vocabulary. A educated modern speaker can have an active vocabulary between 30,000 and 50,000 words, so Shakespeare’s vocabulary is not extraordinarily large compared to people today, but remember that he used 20,000 different words in only about 100,000 lines of verse and prose. That indicates a rich, expressive power. This link lists some of the Shakespeare dictionaries and lexicons available today. http://www.fullmeasurepress.com/pages/links.
