This project explores the neologisms coined by William Shakespeare throughout his literary works. Neologisms are newly invented words or phrases that often reflect the cultural and societal changes of their time. Shakespeare is renowned for his inventive use of language, and many of the words he created have become an integral part of the English lexicon.
Our main research questions we are answering are:
– How has Shakespeare's use of Neologisms influenced his works?
– How are these neologisms spread across his entire corpus?
Throughout this project, we examined the full corpus of Shakespeare's works, including all plays and sonnets. These were formatted as XML files, and our team developed a multi-step process to analyze the text. We first obtained a list of Shakespeare's invented words (neologisms) from: Elizabethan Drama – Invented Words . Using this list, we generated an XSLT transformation that looped across the collection of the corpus and gave markup to each neologism. Using these neologisms, we extracted data for counts and frequency. This, combined with definitions and parts of speech, powered our charts. XSLT also generated each play page, word page, and chart.