The Phrases Shakespeare Actually Coined — and the Ones He Only Popularised

There is a familiar party trick in which a whole paragraph of everyday English is revealed, phrase by phrase, to be Shakespeare’s: you have been eaten out of house and home, sent packing, made to wait with bated breath, and finally told the truth is the truth. It is a lovely trick, and it is mostly true. It is also, in its confident totality, misleading. The plays are the first surviving record of an extraordinary number of English expressions, but first surviving record and invented here are not the same claim, and the gap between them is where most of the bad etymology lives.

Why “first recorded” is not the same as “coined”

The evidence that anchors nearly every Shakespeare-coinage claim is the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites the earliest use it can find for each word and sense. Because Shakespeare was widely read, closely edited and endlessly reprinted, his lines were exactly the kind of text early lexicographers combed for quotations. That gives him a structural advantage: his work was mined for first citations more thoroughly than the pamphlets, ballads, letters and tavern talk that surrounded it and have largely vanished.

Scholars who actually count are careful about this. David Crystal put the number of words for which Shakespeare is the OED’s earliest recorded user at roughly two thousand, then whittled that down by asking which of them were plausibly his own inventions rather than words already circulating that simply happened to survive first in his lines. The tally keeps shrinking as the dictionary is revised: by 2019 the OED’s third edition had cut its count of words first attributed to Shakespeare from around two thousand to under fifteen hundred, as antedatings surfaced earlier uses. As Charlotte Brewer’s work on the OED and Shakespeare shows, the dictionary’s own methods inflated his reputation, and its own revisions are steadily deflating it.

The same logic applies to phrases. A phrase that appears first in Hamlet may be Shakespeare’s coinage, or it may be a bit of Elizabethan common speech that he was simply the first lucky author to have printed and preserved. The honest position is to hold the two possibilities apart.

The phrases that are, as far as anyone can tell, his

Set the caution aside for a moment, because a genuine core remains. There are expressions with no known life before Shakespeare, that fit his imagery, and that entered the language on the strength of his lines. These are the ones worth crediting.

• “Green-eyed monster” — Iago’s name for jealousy in Othello. The colour-coding of envy as green was old; the monster is his.
• “One fell swoop” — Macduff in Macbeth, learning his family has been killed, likens the slaughter to a bird of prey descending on chicks in a single “fell” (savage) swoop.
• “The be-all and the end-all” — Macbeth’s own phrase for the murder he hopes will settle everything.
• “Salad days” — Cleopatra’s phrase in Antony and Cleopatra for her green, inexperienced youth.
• “A foregone conclusion” — again Othello; the sense has drifted, but the phrase is his.
• “The world’s mine oyster” — Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor, promising to prise wealth from the world by force.
• “A wild-goose chase” — in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio uses it of a kind of follow-the-leader horse race; the modern “futile pursuit” is a later shift, but the words are Shakespeare’s.

Even here the proper phrasing is “no earlier use is known,” not “he invented it.” That is not weaselling; it is simply what the evidence supports. But for this group there is no rival claimant, and the balance of probability sits with the Bard.

The phrases he merely gave a good home

Now the corrective. Several of the expressions most confidently attributed to Shakespeare are demonstrably older, and we know this because the earlier uses survive in writing. He did not coin them; he gave them a stage.

“Love is blind”

Jessica says it in The Merchant of Venice, but Chaucer had written it well over a century earlier, in The Merchant’s Tale among others. Shakespeare inherited a proverb already worn smooth by use.

“It’s Greek to me”

Cassius says “it was Greek to me” in Julius Caesar (1599). Yet the idea, and something close to the phrasing, was already circulating: the playwright Thomas Dekker used “it’s Greek to me” in a work of 1600, and the notion descends from a medieval Latin scribes’ note, Graecum est; non legitur — “it is Greek; it cannot be read.” Shakespeare joined a queue rather than starting one.

“A fool’s paradise”

This one is the cleanest refutation of the coinage myth, because the date is so early. The phrase appears in the Paston Letters, a family’s private correspondence, in 1462 — roughly a century before Shakespeare was born. When his Nurse uses it in Romeo and Juliet, she even flags it as a set expression: it was common coin, not a fresh mint.

The honest grey zone

Between the two neat piles sits a third, and any writer who claims otherwise is overselling. “To wear one’s heart upon one’s sleeve” is first recorded in Othello, and it may be Shakespeare’s; but the image plausibly draws on an older custom of knights wearing a lady’s favour on the arm, and lexicographers are careful to note that the phrase may have been in spoken use before it reached the page. First in print is not proof of first in mouth. The right verdict is “first recorded here, quite possibly his, but not certain” — an unsatisfying answer that happens to be the true one.

“To break the ice” belongs in the same uneasy category. Shakespeare uses it in The Taming of the Shrew, and it is often handed to him on that basis, but the metaphor of breaking ice to open a passage was already circulating in English before he wrote, and its roots run back through translations of classical and Renaissance authors. Here the honest verb is again “popularised,” not “coined” — and the general rule the case illustrates is worth stating plainly: whenever a phrase appears in a proverb collection, a translation, or another author’s work before its famous Shakespearean outing, the coinage claim collapses, however often it is repeated.

The Library of Congress’s folklorists make the wider point plainly in their survey of phrases we attribute to Shakespeare: a great many “quotations from Shakespeare” are proverbs he quoted, adapted or happened to record, and the habit of crediting him with all of them tells us more about his cultural authority than about the history of the words.

Why the credit clusters on him anyway

There is a reason the myth is so sticky, and it is not merely laziness. Shakespeare’s versions are usually the best versions. “Love is blind” existed before him, but he set it in a scene that fixed it in memory. Proverbs and stock phrases pass through his hands and come out sharpened, so that his phrasing becomes the one everyone quotes even when the thought is inherited. Popularising, done at that level, is its own kind of authorship — just not the kind that justifies the word “coined.”

So the useful distinction, for anyone who cares about getting origins right, is this. Ask whether an earlier written use survives. If one does, the honest verb is “popularised.” If none does, the honest verb is “first recorded in,” with “possibly coined by” held in reserve. Shakespeare earns the strongest claim on more phrases than almost any other single writer in English — and considerably fewer than the party trick would have you believe. Both halves of that sentence are true, and keeping them together is the whole art of the thing.