However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest fashions and fads for new ideas. The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English language was “An Universall Etymological English Dictionary”, compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721 (the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries). The 17th Century penchant for classical language also influenced the spelling of words like debt and doubt, which had a silent “b” added at this time out of deference to their Latin roots (debitum and dubitare respectively). One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English Literature (other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today). Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: the word the had been written for centuries as þe, using the thorn character of Old English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter “y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting in the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within England - Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to include London), Southern and Kentish - and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety of different spellings. Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug "lexical gaps" where no adjective was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g. Early Modern English Online Dictionary, Grammar, Literature. The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and now obscures the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts. The grammarian John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms. William the Conqueror’s “Domesday Book”, for example, would have been pronounced “doomsday”, as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to use clomb as well as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well as shaved, digged as well as dug, etc. The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. The changes also proceeded at different times and speeds in different parts of the country. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected. But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. Important English playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and of course Shakespeare. This page discusses Shakespeare phrases and idioms – all of the phrases Shakespeare invented when writing his many works. 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