Explorer
The Archaic Threshold
Which Shakespearean words made it from 1600 to 1800, and which didn’t?
English changed dramatically between Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) and the American Revolution. The archaic-form analysis tests thirty-seven specific Shakespearean forms (the second-person pronouns thou, thee, thy, thine, ye; the old-style verb inflections hath, doth, art, saith, hast, dost and a dozen more; discourse markers like methinks and prithee; archaic prepositions like whilst and betwixt; and the old contractions ’tis and ’twas) against each Founder’s full corpus.
A form is counted as surviving in a Founder if he uses it at least five times across his collected writing: a deliberately generous threshold. Below that, the form has effectively died for him: he may have read it, but he doesn’t write it. The survival ratios differ sharply across the six Founders. Pick a Founder below to see which Shakespearean words he kept and which he didn’t.
Compare with
Of the 37 archaic Shakespearean forms tested, Franklin still uses 24 of them in his collected writing — 65% survival.
Shakespeare, c. 1600
the dictionary of his archaic forms
Franklin, c. 1780
what remains
Type size on each side scales with that corpus’s rate of the word, on a log scale. Words struck through on the right have effectively died in the chosen Founder’s prose (below 1 occurrence per million words).
What the threshold says
Franklin kept the most. Hamilton kept the least.
Franklin preserves 65% of Shakespeare’s archaic dictionary. Adams keeps 57%. Jefferson 43%. Madison and Washington sit in the high thirties. Hamilton, at the bottom, retains only 32%: barely more than a third. The number tracks intellectual provenance: Franklin’s prose was set by the late-Stuart English of his half-brother’s print shop; Hamilton’s pulls from Hume and the Roman historians, not from Elizabethan or Jacobean stock. Note that this ranking measures breadth (how many distinct archaic forms survive in a Founder at all), while the composite’s archaic measure ranks density per million words. Franklin tops both; Jefferson, second on density, sits mid-pack on breadth: two different questions, two different answers.
The deaths are predictable in some places and surprising in others. Thou, thee, thy are still alive in every Founder, not in everyday letters but in Biblical quotation and direct address to the Almighty in formal documents. Methinks survives robustly only in Franklin, and it survives in Adams as a near-quotation of Shakespeare himself (see the Methinks I Hear You case study).
The Shakespearean verb-inflection set (hath, doth, saith, dost, wert) is almost completely dead by 1780 in everyone except the most formal contexts. Hath survives across all Founders, but at a rate orders of magnitude below Shakespeare’s. Prithee, forsooth, ere, betwixt are mixed: some have continued life in Founder-era English; others have crossed entirely into the literary-archaic register.
The pattern fits the wider argument. Franklin’s high archaic-survival rate is one more piece of the absorbed-mode case for him: he keeps the texture of older English without naming the source. Jefferson’s strong showing on density matches his enormous private library and his lifetime reading. And Hamilton, who sits near the bottom of the project’s composite ranking, has also shed more of Shakespeare’s archaic dictionary than anyone else — the breadth measure and the overall ranking point the same way at the bottom.
Compare these survival rates to the per-Founder composite scores in the Ranking explorer, or read about the absorbed-mode argument in the Two Modes essay.