Shakespeare is known as a great poet and a dramatist who created numerous coinages because of the necessity of sharply portraying his own perspective for the specific scenes or meeting his poetic rhythm. As a result, his coinages, up to around 2,000 words, were inherited even to this day. Now, we are able to consult several lists of Shakespeare’s coinages, among which Jürgen Schäfer released the first authoritative one in 1980, and it was updated by Toshiaki Okamura in 1996.

Since both of the lists were mainly relying on the information from the Oxford English Dictionary, in this essay, in order to assess its reliability, I am going to compare the list made by Okamura to the first monolingual English dictionary published at the beginning of the 17^th century, Table Alphabeticall by Robert Cawdrey. The main reason for this comparative study is to find out how many of Shakespearean coinages in the list should match the entries in the dictionary of Cowdrey, and consider what kind of shift of evaluation can be ascribed to the list. Through this study, we will come across two possibilities: some words should not be regarded as Shakespeare’s coinages, or some might have infiltrated into the English language soon after their creation. Even if we could point out a few negative results, namely the former possibility, this study will be able to reconfirm the value of other Shakespearean coinages.