04-05-2025
Shakespeare wrongly credited for words first used by women, claims Countdown star
William Shakespeare has been wrongly credited with inventing hundreds of words that may have first been used by women, Countdown's Susie Dent has claimed.
The Bard is often said to have coined around 1,700 English words, including 'bedazzle', 'puke' and 'assassination'.
But speaking on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends podcast, Ms Dent suggested many of these words were mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare simply because his use of them in plays had been preserved.
'[H]e was their mouthpiece,' she said. 'And this is fine. He never claimed to invent these words.'
The Countdown co-host and lexicographer said some of Shakespeare 's seemingly novel expressions were probably part of everyday Elizabethan speech, but their true origins were lost because the voices of ordinary people – particularly women – had not been recorded.
'He is a master obviously, as we know, exuberant with language. But I think particularly the voices of women, which weren't recorded in those days, I think a lot of the words were probably absorbed from them as well,' she said, adding: 'He was their spokesperson.'
Ms Dent said the phenomenon of misattribution was so widespread that it had earned the nickname 'Fakespeare' among dictionary compilers.
The Channel 4 quiz show star said the pattern became clear to her during her time working on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
'In the OED, we give the first record of a word that we can find, many of them credited to Shakespeare,' she said.
'But regularly an email will go around saying 'Fakespeare' as the title because we found what we call an 'ante-dating', so an earlier record before Shakespeare.'
The phenomenon features in Ms Dent's debut novel, Guilty by Definition, a mystery set at the heart of the fictionalised 'Clarendon English Dictionary', published last month.
Ms Dent also told the podcast that the internet was helping dictionary compilers by contributing to the preservation of regional dialects.
She said: 'We rely on printed evidence. And that's particularly tricky with dialect, local words, because they're very much part of an oral tradition. They're not really written down.
'But now we are able to transcribe conversations on the street, thanks to the internet, which a lot of people fear when it comes to language.
'But people are swapping memories of the old words that their parents and their grandparents knew. And we have records of them now. So it's brilliant. So we're getting more and more regional vocabulary in there.'
