Who is widely credited with coining or popularizing hundreds of English words and phrases still used today?

Shakespeare wrote at a time when English was rapidly absorbing new ideas from science, exploration, and continental Europe, but often lacked the words to express them. Writing dozens of plays across decades, he freely invented new words by combining existing ones, turning nouns into verbs, and adding prefixes and suffixes, and because his plays were widely performed and later printed, many of his coinages spread into everyday speech rather than staying confined to the page.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote roughly two centuries earlier, in Middle English, and while he too introduced new terms, far fewer of his coinages survive in modern usage compared with Shakespeare's. Charles Dickens came later and is celebrated more for vivid characters and social commentary than for inventing vocabulary.

Linguists note that Shakespeare didn't invent every word credited to him alone — often he was simply the first to write down a phrase already circulating in spoken English, making his plays the earliest surviving record rather than the true origin.