Sorry, Bard fans.

There was a recent post on io9 debunking the popular rumor that William Shakespeare was responsible for inventing 1,700 English words, including such necessary additions as "puking", "bump", and "eyeball". While Mr. Shakespeare probably was responsible for some of those suckers, the article explains that early version of the Oxford English Dictionary were drawing on a much smaller pool of citations, and therefore Shakespeare was attributed with more than his fair share of words.