There is no doubt that William Shakespeare is the most celebrated dramatist and poet in the English language. His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems and several other poems and have been translated into 80 different languages, including Star Trek’s Klingon (yes, really).
With such a span of works, it’s no surprise that Shakespeare used as many as 20,000 different words in his plays. To put that is made up of only 5,642 words, and an unschooled agricultural worker in Shakespeare’s time would probably have had under 300 words in his vocabulary.
