Bethumped with words

Costard (in Love's Labor's Lost): "O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon."

"Zounds!" as Shakespeare's Philip Faulconbridge (King John) would say. "I was never so bethump'd with words." Most English speakers would likely agree with his sentiment. And yes, "honorificabilitudinitatibus" (meaning profusely lauded) is a word, among the longest in the English language (James Joyce even used it in Ulysses). You'll hurt your brain if you try to pronounce it.

The erudite folks at NoSweatShakespeare.com say the Bard used a total of 17,677 words in all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems. (The American Heritage Dictionary says there are actually 884,647 of them, made up of 29,066 distinct forms. But never mind.) Of those, some 1,700 were first used by Shakespeare. Here are some of the words he brought into common usage:

Accommodation, aerial, amazement, apostrophe, assassination, auspicious, baseless, bloody, bump, castigate, countless, courtship, critic, critical, dexterously, dishearten, dislocate, dwindle, eventful, exposure, fitful, frugal, generous, gloomy, gnarled, hurry, impartial, inauspicious, indistinguishable, invulnerable, lapse, laughable, lonely, majestic, misplaced, monumental, multitudinous, obscene, palmy, perusal, pious, premeditated, radiance, reliance, road, sanctimonious, seamy, sportive, submerge, suspicious.

Amazing. But by now, you may feel like Alonso (The Tempest): "You cram these words into mine ears against the stomach of my sense!"