In many ways Shakespeare is the founder of the modern English that we use. He has enriched the way we speak and understand our language (see Shakespeare's development of modern English). In order to express precisely what he had in mind he created metaphors that so perfectly expressed those
In all of his work - the plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems - Shakespeare uses 17,677 words: Of those, 1,700 were first used by Shakespeare. This list of words that we use in our daily speech were all brought into usage by Shakespeare