“Waste matter discharged from the bowels”

This learned term (for which many colloquial alternatives exist) came into English in this sense just before Shakespeare was born, and is still with us today. But the word in Elizabethan English had a second sense, meaning “outgrowth” - as of hair, nails, or feathers - and this is its meaning in Shakespeare. He is in fact the first to be recorded using it in this way, when Don Armado boasts to Holofernes that the King “with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement, with my mustachio” (Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.1.98). There are a handful of similar uses, such as Gertrude’s description of Hamlet, “Your bedded hair like life in excrementsStart up and stand an end” (Hamlet 3.4.122), and Autolycus’s “Let me pocket up my pedlar’s excrement” (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.709).

David Crystal is the author, with Ben Crystal, of Shakespeare’s Words, published by Penguin in June