Few playwrights are honoured with their own eponymous adjective; even more rarely does it gain currency.

But so distinctive was the voice of Harold Pinter, who has died aged 78, that the first recorded use of the word Pinteresque came as early as 1960, just three years after the first production of any of his plays.

Its precise meaning has been the subject of academic theses and learned articles over the years since, although most people will have their own understanding of the word: Pinter's plays keep the audience guessing, his dialogue keeps them off-balance, unable to relax.

His most famous literary device was borrowed from Samuel Beckett, although it is never described as Beckettian. Like his friend and mentor, Pinter punctuated his scripts with the word "pause", followed by a number of dots to indicate its duration. For a particularly long, menacing pause, he wrote the word "silence".

Of his major works, Betrayal contains no less than 140 scripted pauses, The Caretaker 149 and The Homecoming 224.

But although Pinter later advised actors that they did not have to follow his pauses religiously – and said that he himself, when acting in his own plays, had ignored up to half of them – the pauses were clearly crucial. They helped destroy the meaning of the words in between, to induce the sense of crisis, from words left unspoken.

Yet the writer himself resolutely rejected that "damn word" Pinteresque, including in a Newsnight Review interview in 2006 when he was asked by Kirsty Wark to "finally acknowledge that there is such a thing as a Pinteresque moment".

"I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't," he said. I can detect where a thing is 'Kafkaesque' or 'Chekhovian' but with respect to the 'Pinteresque' I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write."

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