Shakespearean insult generator

How it works

The line is built from four shapes: thou art a single two-word insult, a longer version with two of them, a version with a verb, and one that compares your wit to something. Words come from three lists of mild archaic terms: twenty adjectives such as addle-pated and pottle-deep, twenty-six nouns such as flap-dragon and whey-face, and eight verbs such as prate and cavil. The shape and one word from each slot it uses are drawn separately, so the combinations run into hundreds of thousands. The phrasings are assembled by this page and are not quotations: no line here is taken from a play, and nothing is stored or sent anywhere.

Worked example

The simplest shape takes one adjective and one noun, and 20 × 26 = 520 such pairs exist, for instance "Thou art a knotty-pated flap-dragon." Across the four shapes the count is 520 + 270,400 + 4,160 + 270,400 = 545,480 possible lines, all built from the same three mild lists.

Questions and answers