Work of the Week: Week 1

Welcome to Work of the Week. Each Monday, we will post a list of the ten most frequent words in a well-known work of fiction or non-fiction, along with a count of the number of times each word occurred. The challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to figure out what the work for the week is. At the end of the week, we’ll post the answer along with the ten most frequent words from another work.

Some caveats:

·   Most of the works we’ve chosen were written in English, but a few are widely read translations into English.

·  The function words (pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, etc.) have been removed. These words would dominate the top ten lists but are usually uninformative.

·  If a top ten word would completely give away the name of the work, e.g., the word Moby, we’ve deleted it manually.

·  If a word occurred in different forms, e.g., spear and spears, or throw and threw, the forms have been merged together for the count.

Here’s are the ten most frequent words, with their counts, from this week’s work:

man 510

scout 374

eye 349

heyward 343

duncan 303

make 294

indian 281

place 251

uncas 244

long 242

Can you identify this work?

Except for the deletion of words like Moby, the lists have been automatically generated by programs written by students in the Computational Linguistics Certificate Program at Montclair State University from texts obtained from Project Gutenberg.