Every day, most of us quote Shakespeare, even if we’ve never read a word of his plays. And we don’t even know we’re doing it. Such is the reach of Shakespeare’s mastery of language that phrases he coined and popularised have, over the centuries since he was writing, been woven into our everyday English vocabulary. They range from the obviously poetic to the seemingly banal, but if it wasn’t for Shakespeare, we wouldn’t be using them at all. Here are some of the verbal tics we owe to the Bard.

“Salad days” – Antony and Cleopatra

This is a phrase where the earliest known usage does seem to be Shakespeare – and it comes with a handy definition in the text, too. “My salad days,/ When I was green in judgment: cold in blood”, says Cleopatra. If only she knew that years later it would form some of the most well-known lyrics of ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet. The Eighties owes Shakespeare a great debt, clearly.

“As good luck would have it” – The Merry Wives of Windsor

Falstaff says this one: “As good luck would have it, comes in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford’s approach; and, in her invention and Ford’s wife’s distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.”