What is an inkhorn?

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In his eulogy to Shakespeare published in the 1623 First Folio, fellow playwright Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare’s literary accomplishments despite his having “small Latine, and lesse Greeke.” While Shakespeare put to use what he did know of Latin and Greek in many of his plays and sonnets, he is better known today for his innovative use of the English language.

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Shakespeare turned nouns into verbs (grace, season), created compounds (faire-play, pell-mell), and added prefixes and suffixes (courtship, dauntless, disgraceful). His works were the first to record such words as ‘laughable,’ ‘eventful,’ ‘accommodation’ and ‘lack-lustre’.

But Shakespeare was far from alone in this lexical creativity. In fact, he was part of an early modern trend that saw between 10,000 and 25,000 new words enter the English language in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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These words were directly borrowed from foreign languages—especially Latin and Greek legal, technical, and medical terms—or were newly coined (invented) by writers. Long, Latinate words used, or coined, by scholarly writers soon became known as “inkhorn terms” or “inkhornisms.” 

(full article here)

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While it is an increasing desire to simplify and reduce concepts and language to its simplest forms, Inkhorn Projects recognises the complexities of contemporary life and acknowledges that language, like the way we live our lives and engage with our and other communities, cultures and creativity is a fluid and dynamic beast. While it is not the intent to bring archaic and obtuse language and concepts to the fore, we recognise the opportunity to bring diverse, complex and existing knowledge to build something new and valuable.