Mid-Week Mini: Shakespeare Invented “Eyeball”
In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk about how Shakespeare invented “Eyeball.”
The next time you blink, thank William Shakespeare… because before him, you didn’t even have an “eyeball.”
Welcome to The Internet Says It’s True, the show where we dive into fascinating stories that sound completely made up… but are absolutely true.
William Shakespeare is credited with introducing somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 words into the English language. Now, to be fair, he probably didn’t invent every one of those words completely from scratch. In many cases, he was the first person to write them down, combining existing words in creative ways that simply caught on. One of the most surprising examples is a word we use every single day: eyeball.
Before Shakespeare, people certainly had eyes. They just didn’t have eyeballs. Earlier English referred to the eye in other ways, using words that described the organ without the familiar compound we know today. Then, in his 1603 play Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare wrote the phrase, “The eye-ball…” and just like that, the word entered recorded English.
It’s actually a perfect example of how Shakespeare liked to build words. He often combined two familiar terms into something that felt instantly understandable. “Eyeball” is simple, descriptive, and surprisingly modern sounding for a word that’s more than four hundred years old. Today, it’s so ordinary that it’s hard to imagine English ever existing without it.
And “eyeball” wasn’t his only linguistic gift. Shakespeare is also credited with first recorded uses of words like bedroom, lonely, swagger, critic, fashionable, gossip, addiction, and even uncomfortable. Some historians debate whether he truly invented all of them or simply happened to be the first author whose works survived in print, but there’s no question that his plays helped popularize countless expressions that became part of everyday speech.
So the next time someone rolls their eyeballs at one of your bad jokes, remember… they’re using a word that owes its popularity to the greatest playwright in the English language.
And that’s another story the Internet says is true.
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