A Shakespeare Glossary

Reading Shakespeare is rewarding, interesting, and challenging, but there is no question that it can be difficult. English vocabulary has changed greatly since the 1600s, and it is hard for a modern reader to understand all the nuances. Early Modern English is close enough to ours, that the shape of the story is apparent, but the precise meaning is hard to parse. Which is a shame, because one of the rewards of reading Shakespeare is understanding just how exact his word choice is. Our tool lets you paste any passage of Shakespeare in and identifies words that have changed meaning over time, along with ones that are archaic, and then defines them for you. 

A Shakespeare Lexicon

The definitions in this tool come from Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon, a complete dictionary of every word in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. He compiled it exhaustively in the 1870s, and it remains a standard reference to this day. Each definition comes with Schmidt’s own quotations, showing the word in other places across Shakespeare’s works. Most glossaries let you look up one word at a time. Our tool takes whatever text you paste and works through the whole passage at once.

How to use our Shakespeare Glossary tool

To use the tool, paste your selection of text into the box and then click “Define words.” If you would like to see a sample analysis before using one of your own, click “Try a sample.” The tool will return your text with underlines marking the words that are archaic, the ones whose meaning has changed, and the ones that are uncommon today. Click on any word, not just the underlined ones, to see its definition and where it is found in Shakespeare’s work. Our word search can help you find words and phrases across the body of work.

Who was Alexander Schmidt?

Alexander Schmidt (1816-1876) was a German scholar who recorded and analyzed every word Shakespeare used in his works, every sense in which he used it in, and where each of those instances appeared. The result was the Shakespeare Lexicon, published in two volumes in 1874 and 1875, a labor of love running roughly 1,400 pages and some 50,000 quotations. This tool draws on the third edition, revised and edited by Gregor Sarrazin, in 1902. Unlike Schmidt and Sarrazin, we have digitized documents to work with, in our case the work of the good folks at the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.