Shakespeare introduced nearly 3,000 new words to the English language and had a vocabulary of over 29,000 words. Understanding Shakespeare can be difficult because meanings of words have changed and pronunciations were different. Shakespeare mostly wrote in poetic forms like blank verse, rhyming couplets, and sonnets, reserving prose for scenes requiring wit or lower-status characters. Puns, wordplay, and inventive uses of language were common in Shakespeare's works.