Read the passage.
Word Creators
William Shakespeare is widely credited with adding more than 1,700 new words to the
English language in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Yet some scholars
question that estimate, suggesting that some of the "new" words credited to Shakespeare
may have already been in use when he incorporated them into his plays. So if
Shakespeare didn't radically change the English language, then who did? According to
some language experts, young women, rather than men, are actually responsible for
inventing most new words. Two linguists at the University of Helsinki in Finland analyzed
six thousand letters written between 1417 and 1681. They found that female letter
writers changed the way they wrote more often than their male counterparts. One reason
could be that women often have more social connections than men, and social
connections allow people to introduce each other to new uses of words.
What is the main idea of the passage?
Recent research suggests that the language changes that occurred in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries owed a great deal to female letter writers.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki studied letters written between 1417
and 1681 to try to discover how new words enter the language.
Shakespeare is often credited with adding many new words to the English
language.