25 Common Phrases Borrowed from Shakespeare That Most People Don’t Realize
English is a language full of borrowed furniture — expressions that have been sitting in the room so long, nobody remembers who dragged them in. Shakespeare dragged in more than most.
The man wrote roughly 37 plays and 154 sonnets across a career that spanned the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and somewhere in that output, he coined, recorded, or popularized an astonishing number of phrases that are still in daily rotation. You’ve almost certainly used several of them today without giving him a second thought.
That’s either a mark of his genius or the ultimate irony, depending on how you look at it.
Break the Ice
This one comes from The Taming of the Shrew, where a character refers to the effort required to open up a cold and unwilling conversation — the way a ship breaks ice to move forward. Now it gets used at every awkward office party and first date in the country without a single thought about its origin.
Go figure.
Wild Goose Chase
Shakespeare dropped this phrase into Romeo and Juliet during a rapid-fire verbal sparring match between Romeo and Mercutio, where it referred to a kind of horse race where riders had to follow a lead horse wherever it went — erratic, unpredictable, exhausting.
The meaning drifted toward futile pursuit over the centuries, which, to be fair, captures the feeling even better than the original did. So the phrase actually improved in translation.
Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve
Othello gave this one to the world, and it’s a line worth sitting with — Iago says it almost mockingly, as a description of the kind of dangerous emotional transparency he would never allow himself. The phrase carries that same faint warning even today, as if admitting you’re open-hearted is still, somehow, a confession of vulnerability rather than a virtue.
It’s never quite lost that edge.
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Most people misquote this as “all that glitters is not gold,” and — well, that’s actually correct, though the original line in The Merchant of Venice reads “all that glisters is not gold.” The meaning hasn’t moved an inch in four hundred years: surfaces lie, appearances deceive, and the casket that looks the best is often the one you shouldn’t open.
Turns out, that lesson doesn’t expire.
Good Riddance
This phrase arrives fully formed in Troilus and Cressida, used with the exact same dry dismissiveness it carries today. Shakespeare didn’t invent the sentiment — people have been glad to see the backs of other people since the beginning of time — but he packaged it into two words that have never been improved upon.
Short, final, and unmistakably satisfying.
Foregone Conclusion
Othello again — this time Othello himself uses a version of the phrase to describe something already decided before the deliberation is even pretended at, which is, when you think about it: exactly how the phrase still functions in boardrooms, courtrooms, and sports commentary boxes across the country today. The idea that a conclusion can be “foregone” — predetermined, sealed, done before it’s officially done — is a surprisingly sophisticated legal and philosophical concept compressed into two words.
Shakespeare had a gift for compression that most writers spend entire careers chasing without catching.
In a Pickle
This one feels almost too casual to be Shakespearean, and yet there it is in The Tempest — Trinculo declares himself “in a pickle,” and the context suggests both literal brine and the figurative mess of a situation. The phrase kept the mess, dropped the brine, and somehow ended up sounding like something a grandmother would say to a toddler.
Which is its own kind of linguistic journey.
Cruel to Be Kind
Hamlet owns this one — Hamlet tells his mother that he must be cruel to be kind, that the honesty hurting her is also the honesty protecting her. It’s since been defanged into a gentle justification for mild unpleasantness, used to explain everything from a blunt performance review to taking away a teenager’s car keys.
The original context had considerably higher stakes.
The World Is Your Oyster
From The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the character Pistol delivers the line with a kind of theatrical swagger — the oyster is the world, the sword is the means of opening it, and the pearl inside is whatever fortune you’re after. Motivational posters have been borrowing it ever since, usually without the sword, which removes most of the original point.
Green-Eyed Monster
Shakespeare didn’t invent jealousy, but he named its color in Othello, where Iago — reliable source of terrible advice — warns Othello about the “green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” The phrase stuck with a grip that four centuries haven’t loosened, and now green is so firmly associated with envy that it’s hard to imagine it being any other shade.
That’s the kind of cultural staying power that most writers don’t achieve in multiple lifetimes.
Lie Low
Much Ado About Nothing contains the earliest known use of this phrase, spoken plainly and with obvious practical intent — stay out of sight, don’t draw attention, wait for the trouble to pass. The advice is solid.
It’s also the kind of advice people in the modern era tend to receive during everything from legal disputes to social media controversies, which suggests that human trouble, across four centuries, has remained remarkably consistent.
Send Him Packing
Henry IV Part 1 is the source, and the phrase meant then exactly what it means now: dismiss someone firmly, with no room for negotiation or return. Shakespeare’s English was capacious enough to hold both the grand and the blunt, and “send him packing” is about as blunt as language gets — three words, one direction, no ambiguity.
Vanish Into Thin Air
Othello contributes again — this time through a phrase so evocative that it became the default shorthand for any sudden, complete disappearance. “Thin air” is a strange construction when you examine it directly: air has no thickness, and yet “thin air” feels instinctively right in a way that “air” alone never would.
Shakespeare understood that slight wrongness is sometimes what makes a phrase unforgettable.
A Laughing Stock
This one surfaced in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where it described someone who had become the object of communal mockery — specifically, the kind of extended, public ridicule that a small community could sustain over a very long time. The “stock” part likely referred to a wooden post, something fixed and immovable, which adds a grim visual to the phrase that the modern version doesn’t quite preserve.
Even so, the meaning landed and stayed.
Too Much of a Good Thing
As You Like It delivers this in the voice of Rosalind, who uses it to push back on the excesses of romantic devotion — a surprisingly sharp observation dressed in the language of practicality. It’s been adopted as a proverb, printed on kitchen tea towels, and applied to everything from dessert to vacation time, which is perhaps its own form of irony.
Too much of this phrase, arguably, has diluted it.
Bedazzled
— Photo by mwissmann
The Taming of the Shrew used “bedazzled” to describe being overcome and blinded by brightness — specifically, the dazzling quality of sunlight after long darkness. The word quietly survived into the modern era and then got thoroughly hijacked by a rhinestone-applying craft tool that became its own cultural phenomenon.
Shakespeare would probably have had something pithy to say about that.
Foul Play
Hamlet crystallized this phrase into its familiar shape, though Shakespeare used it in multiple plays. The sense is precise: something has gone wrong not by accident but by design, and the wrongness is morally significant.
Sports co-opted the term and made it literal, which is actually a reasonable extension — and the phrase now does double duty, functioning equally well in both a murder mystery and a penalty box.
Puking
As You Like It contains one of the earliest recorded uses of “puking” in English, listed among the seven ages of man in Jaques’s famous speech — the infant is described as “mewling and puking.” Not Shakespeare’s most celebrated line, but it’s quietly remarkable that a word describing something so viscerally unpleasant has maintained this level of linguistic staying power across four centuries without any meaningful competition.
Budge
Coriolanus provides an early recorded use of “budge” as a verb meaning to move even slightly — and it still carries that same quality of stubborn resistance, as if the word itself refuses to go anywhere. Telling someone they “won’t budge” is a precise and almost physical description, one that conveys immovability without needing any elaboration.
Shakespeare had a talent for choosing words that feel like the thing they describe.
Cold-Blooded
King John gave English this phrase, and it arrived already carrying a moral charge — describing someone who acts without the warmth of human feeling, whose decisions bypass the emotional currents that govern ordinary people. Cold-blooded became a fixture of crime reporting, legal language, and thriller fiction, always carrying that same implication: something happened here that should have provoked feeling, and it didn’t.
Eyeball
The Tempest is credited with the first written appearance of “eyeball” as a compound noun — Prospero uses it with such casual ease that it suggests the word may have already been in spoken use. It’s now so ordinary that it’s hard to register it as a coined term at all, which is the highest compliment a word can receive: to become so necessary that its absence becomes unimaginable.
Bedroom
A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains one of the earliest documented uses of “bedroom” as a single word rather than two separate ones. It’s the kind of domestic, unremarkable term that nobody pauses over, which is precisely why its Shakespearean origin is so easy to miss.
Words that name ordinary spaces rarely get credit for having been invented at all.
Zany
Love’s Labour’s Lost used “zany” to describe a clownish assistant or imitator — someone who mimics a master performer in an exaggerated and slightly embarrassing way. The word has since loosened considerably, shedding its hierarchical meaning and becoming a general descriptor for silly, offbeat behavior.
It’s one of the more cheerful entries in Shakespeare’s long list of contributions to the language.
Lackluster
As You Like It is the source, where Shakespeare used “lack-lustre” to describe dull eyes — specifically the glazed, indifferent look of a man who has mentally checked out of a conversation. The hyphen eventually got dropped, the meaning broadened from eyes to anything dull and uninspired, and the word slid into everyday critical vocabulary, where it remains a politely withering choice for a review that doesn’t want to say “bad” outright.
Swagger
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V both contain early uses of “swagger,” and the word carries what it carries now: a performance of confidence that is slightly too visible, a walk that announces itself before the person has said a word. Shakespeare used it with mild mockery intact, which is interesting, because modern usage has fully rehabilitated it into something aspirational.
The word traveled, and somewhere along the way it forgot to be embarrassed.
The Words Are Still Working
There’s something quietly remarkable about the fact that you can read a 400-year-old play and find the exact phrase you texted someone this morning. Language usually erodes — words blur, meanings shift, old expressions get replaced by newer ones that feel fresher for about a generation before they too go stale.
Shakespeare’s phrases didn’t erode. They calcified into the bedrock of everyday English, buried so deep that they stopped feeling like borrowings and started feeling like their own.
The next time you tell someone it’s a wild goose chase, or that they’re wearing their heart on their sleeve, or that something glitters but isn’t gold — you’re not just speaking. You’re quoting. You just didn’t know it until now.
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