LINGOJAM

English to Shakespearean Translator

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CAUTION: This translator is exaggerated for comic effect and should not be used for serious translations! It's just for fun. If you want a slightly more accurate translator, use this link: Shakespearean.

If you're looking for an Old English Translator, then click that link. Old English is very different to Shakespearean/Elizabethan English, which falls under the category of Early Modern English. Thus, this translator converts Modern English into (exaggerated) Early Modern English.

To give you some perspective: Old English gave way to Middle English, which gave way to Early Modern English, which gave way to Modern English (this stuff!). Of course, these are just labels that historians and linguists have assigned - there weren't sudden transitions between any of these classifications. Here's a great image showing the transition from old to middle to early to modern (it's from this webpage):

The word "Elizabethan" can refer to anything which resembles or is related to the Elizabethan era in England's history - the latter half of the 1500s when Queen Elizabeth I ruled. "Shakespearean" refers to anything that resembles or relates to the works of William Shakespeare.

Also worth noting is that during the vast majority of the medieval period, Old English was spoken in English-speaking countries. It was only near the end of the medieval period that we could really their language to be close to Shakespearean/Elizabethan/Early Modern English.

Shakespeare's Words

Shakespeare is well known for having introduced hundreds of new words to the the English vocabulary, many of which are still used today. Of his roughly 17,000 words used across his works, as many as 1,700 were devised by himself [1]. He created words by "changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original." [2].

Some examples of the words he invented are: accused, addiction, advertising, assasination, bedroom, bloodstained, fashionable, gossip, hint, impede, invulnerable, mimic, monumental, negotiate, rant, secure, submerge, and swagger.

If you like this, you might like to see some of my other stuff on my website. I also made a fancy text generator and a wingdings translator using LingoJam.