Word Creators
William Shakespeare is widely credited with adding more than 1,700 new words to the English language in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Yet some scholars question that estimate, suggesting that some of the "new" words credited to Shakespeare may have already been in use when he incorporated them into his plays. So if Shakespeare didn't radically change the English language, then who did? According to some language experts, young women, rather than men, are actually responsible for inventing most new words. Two linguists at the University of Helsinki in Finland analyzed six thousand letters written between 1417 and 1681. They found that female letter writers changed the way they wrote more often than their male counterparts. One reason could be that women often have more social connections than men, and social connections allow people to introduce each other to new uses of words.
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