Search Shakespeare Works

The majesty of Shakespeare’s words

Shakespeare left behind a large body of work, comprising roughly 880,000 words in total. In that corpus he used about 17,000 to 31,000 unique words. As a sign of how remarkable that was for the time, contrast it with the King James Bible, published in the same era, which uses approximately 8,000 to 12,000. He was skilled at word play and is credited with the first recorded use of around 1,700 words. He often made new ones by adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words (un-, -less, -ful), by combining two words into one, or by turning nouns into verbs. Phrases from his work, like break the ice, wild-goose chase, green-eyed monster, in a pickle, heart of gold, and all that glisters (now glitters) is not gold, are part of our language to this day. His insults are superb in design, try our insult generator to explore further.

How to use the Search Shakespeare’s Works tool

You can use this tool to search all of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, sonnets, and poems for any word or phrase. Type or paste your selection into the box, and the tool will show every place it appears, along with the work, act, scene, and speaker. Click a result to read the full passage. On a side note, The Passionate Pilgrim was published under Shakespeare’s name in 1599, but only five of its twenty poems are known to be his, so results from it show who wrote each poem.

• Shakespeare’s printed spelling often shortens words, such as o’er for over and remember’d for remembered. The search matches both forms, so you can type modern spelling.
• Check “Exact spelling only” to find a word only as it is printed.
• Capital letters and punctuation do not affect the search.
• Results are grouped by work.
• Each work shows how many times your search appears and how often it appears per 10,000 words, so a short comedy and a long tragedy can be compared fairly.
• “Who says it” shows which characters use the word most, and the strip under each play shows which acts it appears in.
• When you search for a single word, a modern dictionary definition appears above the results.

What makes this search different

Most Shakespeare searches give you a simple list of play lines. This one, like most of our tools, looks at underlying patterns. Alongside every match, it tells you how often a word appears in each work, which acts it clusters in, and which characters say it most. You can see at a glance that a word runs through one play from beginning to end, or gathers in a single act, or belongs almost entirely to one character. Like real people, Shakespeare’s characters use vocabulary that matches their personality and their place in society, and that shows up in how often certain words recur. The tool also shows each result as a rate per 10,000 words, so a short comedy and a long tragedy can be compared on equal terms. A word that appears only a few times in a short play may turn out to matter more there than in a long one.

You do not need to know Elizabethan spelling to use it. Shakespeare’s printed text shortens words constantly: o’er for over, remember’d for remembered, ’tis for it is, th’art for thou art. Type the modern form and the search finds the printed one. Phrases are found even when they break across two lines of verse or around a dash, so “to die to sleep” finds Hamlet’s “To die—to sleep.” If you want only the spelling as printed, use the checkbox. Every speech is credited to the right speaker, including songs, choruses, and prologues. Poems are cited by stanza and line.

Because this is a complicated search, we took care to test the results. The text was checked line by line against its source and every word was accounted for, and each speech was matched to the character who speaks it. The act and scene divisions were compared against the Folger edition for all 38 plays. More than 150 automated checks run every time the tool is updated, so a fix in one place cannot break something else.