Recently I was listening to a series of radio broadcasts that Bill Bryson made a couple of years back, bundled together with the title Journeys in English – it’s fascinating stuff about the development of the English language, and interesting for me both as a writer and as an English teacher. (Yes, I recommend it!)

Anyhow, while any number of interesting points remained in my mind after listening to the programmes, one fact stuck out that I felt I should have known already. I kind of knew that Shakespeare had invented a few words, but somehow in my head these were more along Jabberwocky lines – interesting, but not very useful. Turns out I was wrong.

You may already know this, but just in case you don’t, Shakespeare was responsible for introducing a whole bunch of rather important words into the English language. From this list of words he invented, just a few that I both like and use regularly include:

• suspicious
• generous
• frugal
• premeditated
• amazement

And ol’ William was responsible for a bunch of phrases too, including:

• method in his madness
• it’s Greek to me (by the way, it’s fun to ask speakers of other languages for the matching phrase)
• break the ice
• be all and end all

I confess to only tolerating Shakespeare in high school – I liked the storylines, but the language was really not that fun for me. Somewhere in my bookshelves is a complete works of Shakespeare, but I haven’t been back to look at it for many a year. Perhaps I should when I need some solid literary inspiration, or even just a few new words.

Any Shakespeare fans out there? Let me know which play I should read first when I finally pick that hefty book off my shelf.