ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors present an historical introduction to hard words in Early Modern English and shows how they can annotate Shakespeare's texts for words that caused trouble to his audiences and readers. They analyze Richard III, hard words in the two orations by Richmond and Richard to their troops before the Battle of Bosworth Field. The authors also analyze the use of hard words in the whole of the Internet Shakespeare edition of The Tempest to test whether hard words are used consistently as part of characterization. Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) meet a basic need for hard-word harvesting. To discover whether a word is hard, a reader selects the LEME Advanced Lexicon Search and limits a search to the lexicon genre called "Hard words". LEME delivers a chronological list of matching word-entries, each abbreviated but expandable.
