John Milton coined more English words than anyone else.
The English language is the result of thousands of years of collaboration and evolution. Although its Germanic roots provide core function words, English is filled with loanwords from more than 350 languages. Of course, the language has also been blessed by many writers and poets whose inventive vocabularies fill our dictionaries — and no one is as etymologically prolific as the English poet John Milton. His most famous work, “Paradise Lost” (an epic poem retelling the biblical allegory of Adam and Eve), is considered to be one of the finest pieces of English literature, but Milton has another claim to fame as the writer who coined the most English words. During his 65 years on Earth, Milton created 630 new words and phrases, including “debauchery,” “fragrance,” and “pandemonium” (the latter from the name of Hell’s capital city in “Paradise Lost”).
Although Milton leads the pack, he does have some stiff competition. For example, William Shakespeare has slightly fewer than 500 word coinages to his name, by some counts. Meanwhile, the English polymath and author Thomas Browne is credited with 771 “first use” words (such as “carnivorous,” “hallucination,” and “ferocious”) by the Oxford English Dictionary, although that doesn’t necessarily mean he invented them. Most scholars believe Browne and Shakespeare’s “new word” contributions are much lower than Milton’s, although the history of language is tricky — it’s extremely difficult to know if a writer created a new word from scratch or was simply the first to use an already existing word. Other writers who’ve made sizable contributions include Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, and Ben Jonson.
William Shakespeare is one of the most widely read and analyzed writers in human history, so it may seem surprising that there are entire works written by him that no living person has ever read. At least two of Shakespeare’s plays are lost to history, including Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio, the latter of which he co-wrote with another famous English playwright, John Fletcher. Of course, these are the two that scholars know about thanks to references to them from other sources. It’s possible more Shakespeare plays are lost — after all, most works during the Bard’s time didn’t survive to the modern day.
