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Shakespeare is credited with the first use of the word "Arch-villain" in his play Measure For Measure, but he did not invent "cheap". The noun sense of "cheap" (a cheap was a market or a bargain) goes back to Old English. The adjective form was just coming into use in the Elizabethan era: Shakespeare is credited with the first use of the word in some senses, but other similar uses were first recorded by other people including the playwright Thomas Dekker, some of them when Shakespeare was a schoolboy in Stratford. Shakespeare can hardly be credited with coining the word "cheap"

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15y ago

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