: What are the words that were used during Shakespeare's time that are seldom used nowadays? I would like to write a Shakespearean poem that reads and sounds like a poem written during that time
I would like to write a Shakespearean poem that reads and sounds like a poem written during that time period. However, I don't know where I can find an exhaustive list of words that were used during that time with the corresponding words used today. Could someone help me out? I don't want to use some Shakespearean words and end up leaving some, because I am not aware of them. I want to go 100% Shakespearean.
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For a discussion on outdated words that once had a rather more complex usage in "Back in the Day" times, check out TVTrope's article "Get Thee to a Nunnery" which has a whole section devoted to both the Bard himself and the Bible (a very naughty book, mind you). Shakespeare himself is the god of Dad Jokes and most of his works are filled with quaint euphamisms that were definately meant to be taken the wrong way, such as words like "Wit" and "Stones" are meant to be male genitalia (Wit, in most examples given, is almost always discussed in some term of length or size) and words like "Nothing", "Cut", "Ring" and "Quaint" (pun intended) were female.
The title of the article is a line from "Hamlet" where Hamlet and his love interest Ophilia are engaging in flirtatious play and he admonishes her for something she said by saying "Get Thee to a Nunnery" which at the time, was a Euphamism for a brothel, not a convent (where Nuns live).
There are also several plays that mock Shakespeare by playing up to his style. "The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)" is loving parody of Shakespeare's entire collection of works. If you go to youtube and search "Shakespeare's Who's on First" you'll find a video of two players performing the famous Abbot and Costello sketch as if Shakespeare had written it.
After you're done reading the sonnets, you can check your newly learned words against this reference of Common Words & Phrases in Shakespeare's World:
learn.lexiconic.net/shakewords.htm
A note of caution. As with any pre-compiled work that is not the direct result of your efforts, I would still recommend a bit of skepticism when approaching such a shopping list.
Another source for Shakespeare is the Kaggle Data file of the complete works. This has the complete Shakespeare including the plays and the poems in a csv file and can be easily filtered to include just the plays or just the poems or whatever you are interested in.
A concordance lists every word used in a work (or across a series of works) alphabetically, so the link Concordance of Shakespeare's complete works from OpenSourceShakespeare will be helpful. Clicking on a word will show you which works it was used in, and clicking on the title of the work will show you the exact quotes.
OpenSourceShakespeare also has the full text of Shakespeare's works if you want to just read.
Here are Shakespeare's sonnets in a text file from Guttenberg.org
www.gutenberg.org/files/1041/1041.txt
Open the file in a text editor and strip away the metadata and footnotes.
These are the literal words that he used when writing poetry.
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