Jason Kottke has a neat little post for Shakespeare fans (and even those who aren't fans.) Called How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know, he lays out some interesting numbers. How's this:
In his collected writings, Shakespeare used 31,534 different words.
14,376 words appeared only once and 846 were used more than 100 times.
But that's only the words he used. Read the post to see how we think we know how many he actually knew.