chantler63

By chantler63

Hundreds & Thousands

Theoretically, these cake decorations could be counted... but I have used them for today's Shakespeare word challenge: COUNTLESS. Bonus is that we get to eat the cake!

Countless
is not a verb but a determiner for uncountable number of quantity
Shakespeare gave us so much more than his plays In fact, any entertainment that relies on elements such as the supernatural, witches, fairies, or subjects such as betrayal, fratricide, murder, lust, love at first sight, forbidden love, interracial relationships, aging, guilt, retribution, or themes such as good versus evil and appearance versus reality, likely owe a debt to the Bard.

Countless words such as swagger, assassination, moonbeam, gnarled, cold-blooded and green-eyed were coined by Shakespeare.
Titus Andronicus ACT V SCENE III
Tear for tear, and loving kiss for kiss,
Thy brother Marcus tenders on thy lips:
O were the sum of these that I should pay
Countless and infinite, yet would I pay them!


Shakespeare is responsible for making far more new senses for existing words than he is for inventing words outright. He sometimes took existing nouns and made them verbs and vice-versa. A good example of this is the word 'shudder'. Before Shakespeare, it is only recorded as a verb, but in Timon of Athens he used it as a noun. There are 200 similar examples in his works. He also used words that were already known, but added a new meaning. For example, the word 'angel' in its religious sense dates back to Anglo-Saxon but in the sense of a lovely person it makes its first recorded appearance in the pages of Romeo and Juliet.

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