Depicted below is a comparison of the amount of neologisms arranged in a chronological manner. For each play, these years are estimates. The chronology of Shakespeare's plays is obtained from E.K Chambers, who spent his life doing an extensive examination of Shakespeare's works.
This chart below examines the distribution of part of speech across all of Shakespeare's
neologisms. The part of speech data was obtained from the Oxford English Dictionary.
High-frequency words often appear across multiple plays, meaning they entered Shakespeare’s regular personal vocabulary, and were not just one-off innovations.
Frequency Is Not Distributed Evenly
Across the entire corpus, Shakespeare’s neologisms fall into two sharply different behaviors:
• a small handful of sound-based words repeat dozens of times,
• while hundreds of semantic neologisms appear only once.
This is the biggest structural imbalance in the dataset.
The main pattern across all Shakespearean neologisms is a split between “sound-based” stage words (high frequency) and “semantic” invented words (low frequency). The sound-words repeat constantly because they function as musical cues, crowd noises, or comedic fillers. The semantic words barely appear more than once, but they’re the ones that actually expand English into new conceptual territory. This explains why the most common invented words are nonsense syllables, yet the part-of-speech breakdown is dominated by complex adjectives.
Shakespeare frequently reuses the prefix un- over and over (unbated, unwept, unsex, unearthly) and the same evaluative endings like -less, -ful, -ish, -able, etc. He’s not inventing brand-new roots, but just attaching familiar prefixes and suffixes to normal words. That’s why most of the neologisms end up being adjectives, as he is basically using modified or intensified versions of existing ideas, not new concepts.