William Shakespeare invented or first recorded more than 1,700 English words.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists Shakespeare as the first person to write down over 1,700 words. Linguist David Crystal found that Shakespeare used about 20,000 different words in his plays and poems. This was much larger than the vocabulary of a typical person in the 1500s.Shakespeare invented the word 'eyeball' for his play 'The Tempest' around 1610. He used the word 'swagger' for the first time in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in the mid-1590s. He also created the word 'manager' in the play 'Love's Labour's Lost'.He often changed how words worked by adding endings like '-ed' or '-ness'. He used 'functional shift' to turn nouns into verbs. For example, he used the word 'friend' as a verb hundreds of years before social media existed.He also combined two words to make one new description, like 'blood-stained'. About one out of every ten words he used was new to the English language at that time. Researchers at the University of Warwick use computers to study his writing and confirm these word origins.