Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Search Words by First Known Use Date

"Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet" — Abraham Lincoln

Yeah, that seems like a good way to think of it.

> Shakespeare is often credited with inventing huge numbers of words, but it is more likely that he was just the first to get them into print, in a form that survived.

That might be less true than someone might guess today. From ~1475, when the printing press arrived in the British Isles, through Shakespeare's time and until Samuel Johnson's dictionary of ~1755, is called the Early Modern period in English. During it was also the Reformation of the 16th century and the growth of science in the 17th century, and London's population doubling multiple times.

Before that, Middle English was a backwater, a limited language not respected even in its own country. "Early in the period, English was frequently compared unfavourably as a literary language with Latin. It was also initially seen as not possessing advantages over other European language ...". [0]

But early in Shakespeare's career: " ... there was a sudden change between 1570 and 1580. English began to be praised, in contrast with other languages, for its copious vocabulary, linguistic economy (in using words of mainly one or two syllables), and simple grammar." [0]

"The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for this purpose. Others advocated the revival of obsolete words and the adoption of regional dialect." [1]

"Tudor-Stuart English education loved words, and its young men spent years studying them to the exclusion of most other useful arts and sciences. Educators, lawyers, secretaries, courtiers, entertainers, and even tradesmen earned their living by their ability with words." [0]

"Studying (in grammar school) historical languages opened up to literate English people four centuries ago an amazing network linking time-present English words (whether taken consciously from Latin and Greek, or descending from then, or simply taken from other current vernaculars) with such time-past words" [0]

"John Florio's title, Worlde of Words (1598, 1611) [an Italian-English dictionary], memorably announces a revelation of the lexical entanglement of English with other tongues, driven by the general borrowing of foreign words by English speakers and writers. Borrowings led to the study of etymology, a tool by scholars that uncovered the past of everything that had names." [0]

Which leads us, through many twists and turns, to OP, Merriam-Webster's etymological dictionary, and the to the language we are all writing in. I recommend either of the citations below for more.

[0] https://leme.utoronto.ca/?page_id=33

[1] https://public.oed.com/blog/early-modern-english-an-overview...