Today in 1564, William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (his date of birth is unknown).
“Shakespeare is credited with having used 29,066 different text words in his complete works, but in terms of truly distinct words, and disregarding overlapping usages, there are fewer than 20,000. A well-educated American may have a vocabulary of 20,000 words but will use no more than 1,500 to 2,000 over the course of a week. Half of the conversational vocabulary of an American teenager consists of fewer than 40 words”—Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 2007.
“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the internet, we know that is not true.” —Robert Wilensky, 1996