I suppose a similar claim could be made for Chaucer and Dante, who also wrote down, for the first time, many words that had not appeared in print before. Those many words may, indeed, have appeared for the first time in his work, but the number he actually came up with “out of thin air” is no doubt smaller. It’s been variously estimated that the number of words “invented” by Shakespeare is somewhere between 1,400 and 1,700, which is remarkable, and as you say, probably not literally true. Perhaps Amata will comment further on that word and other Amerindisms. The 'probably imitative' etymology is hardly all that we can say about this word's origins.Ībout hominy, David, you're quite right it's a borrowing from an Algonquian language and so one would expect a variety of spellings to appear in the early period of its inclusion and adaptation in English.

I believe the same is true for 'puke' and can think of lots of evidence to back that up just sitting here in the kitchen that goes beyond what my (respectable but often wrong or incomplete) etymological dictionary says or what the typical Googly resources spew up. The word fuck is similarly attested first in the early modern period but is in my opinion (as an historical linguist) without doubt much older. That it is first attested in a text by him is to be sure interesting and amusing but, given the nature of the word, it wouldn't be at all surprising if the word had been around for a more or less very long time and that it just doesn't happen to turn up in any (survivng) texts that predate Shakespeare. Shakespeare - one of my etymological dictionaries indicates that - but it strikes me as very unlikely he 'invented' the word. 'Puke' may well be first attested chez Mr. I was wondering where you came across this claim?īoth 'anchovy' and 'cater' are loanwords, the former with ultimately obscure origins (though likely from an Iberian language - i.e., pre Indo-European language of Iberia, likely related to Basque) and the latter with a fairly clear but rather complex history of development within English (ultimately going back to a Latin word, then with various semantic and morphological developments in addition to the phonological developments). I'm glad you put (scare-)quotes around the word invent here because it surely is not the appropriate verb, without doubt in the first two cases and almost without doubt in the third. David Hammond wrote:Fun fact (marginally related to this discussion): Shakespeare 'invented' the word 'cater' (as in, to bring food), as well as 'anchovy' and 'to puke.'

Your chronicle anchovy sandwich