Jane Demmen News Today

The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language addresses questions of meaning and structure in the playwright’s work. Which words did he coin? Take a look.

William Shakespeare used the word dotage to capture reduced mental ability (as in being blindly in love) rather than as a quaint term for old age, successes were really outcomes – one could talk of a ‘bad success’ – and, it turns out, the word bastar

New research by Lancaster University sheds light on Shakespearean times with the publication of The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language, to be published by Bloomsbury on August 24. A key feature of the project is that is uses corpus linguistics, the computer-aided analysis of massive datasets of language, to provide evidence-based accounts of Shakespeare's language.

Lancaster University researchers studied more than 2billion words from books and parliamentary speeches. They found that potholes were mentioned 37 times more often than heart failure.