The game is up: Shakespeare's language not as original as dictionaries think

Australian academic David McInnis claims literary bias by first editors of OED has credited Shakespeare with inventing phrases in common Elizabethan use

Shakespeare did not coin phrases such as “it’s Greek to me” and “a wild goose chase”, according to an Australian academic.

In an article for the University of Melbourne, Dr David McInnis, a Shakespeare lecturer at the institution, accuses the Oxford English Dictionary of “bias” over its citation of Shakespeare as the originator of hundreds of words in English. The OED, which saw its original volumes published between 1884 and 1928, includes more than 33,000 Shakespeare quotations, according to McInnis, with around 1,500 of those “the first evidence of a word’s existence in English”, and around 7,500 “the first evidence of a particular usage of meaning”.

His audiences had to understand at least the gist of what he meant, so his words were mostly in circulation already

Shakespeare's talent lies in his insights into human nature and ability to tell great tales – not just coning new words

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