Shakespeare Defined offers a 30,000 term Shakespeare Thesaurus. You can search on the original Shakespearean term, or on the modern definition.
This is not a generic Elizabethan dictionary, but rather a lexicon specific to Shakespeare's works. Every single word Shakespeare uses in his works is defined here. As such, it makes an excellent research tool for finding the exact meaning of Shakespeare's words, and to find the Shakespearean equivalents of modern words.
Here we see the results of a search for "Quickly" in Shakespeare's works:
| Quickly | "speedily; without delay, soon" |
| Quickly | name of the hostess and procuress of Falstaff |
In a search for "Sleepy" in the modern definitions, it's not surprising to find "drowsy" as one occurrence, but it is a surprise to find that Shakespeare used "heavy" to mean sleepy:
| Drowsy | sleepy, heavy, dull |
| Heavy | weary, drowsy, sleepy |
A search for the term "Whoreson" shows that Shakepeare used it both to mean "bastard" and as a term of coarse familiarity amongst friends:
| Whoreson | bastard |
| Whoreson | a term of coarse familiarity, == fellow, when used as a substantive |
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