Shakespeare gets credit for hundreds of English words with no earlier trace.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits Shakespeare with the earliest surviving written use of hundreds of English words and phrases, from “eyeball” to “bedroom” to “in a pickle.” That’s partly a real mark of his inventiveness with language, and partly a quirk of the historical record.

Because his plays were so widely copied, performed, and eventually printed, they survived in far greater volume than most other writing of the period. Words already in spoken use may simply have no earlier surviving written record — meaning Shakespeare is sometimes the first person we know of to write a word down, not necessarily the first to say it.