This week begins a fun series on words that Shakespeare coined! The words themselves may or may not have a lot of interesting etymology otherwise…but they’re making this list simply because they were introduced to us by the Bard. 😉

Cold-hearted is one such word, first appearing in Shakespeare around 1600. Just a decade or so before this we saw the introduction of cold-blooded, as in “someone without emotion, lacking the usual sympathies,” to which cold-hearted is clearly related. The belief at the time was that our blood literally warmed up as we got more excited (rather understandable given that we feel flushed and hot). So naturally, words and phrases were created to capture the opposite too.

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