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John Heminge and Henry Condell first speak of Shakespeare's idiolect — his personal language behaviour — in their preface to the 1623 folio: `His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.' They echo Shakespeare, who said, of his `noted weed,' that `every word doth almost [tell] my name, / Showing their birth, and where they did proceed' (sonnet 76.6–8). For these three men, style is more than `an elegant fourme or order in writynge or speakinge,' and invention more than rhetorical inventio, where one finds material in `loci or ``places, seats'' in one's notebooks.' Idiolect reflects `mind' and should be approached through cognition. Descartes notwithstanding, mind is now analysable biologically by scientific methods. Even in the humanities, authorship attribution now uses quantitative profiles of lexical, grammatical, metrical, and syntactic regularities, such as function-word combinations, rare words, and affix usage, as markers of idiolect. Computer text-analysis charts these regularities in concordance, graph, and table and distinguishes the random from the statistically significant, but understanding these textual objects gets us only partway towards idiolect because writing does not exhaust an author's uttering.

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