Work of the Week: Week 4

Work of the Week>

Welcome to Week Four of “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 is the answer for Week Three’s “Work of the Week”. See if you guessed right!:

monica 612

miss 509

make 458

rhoda 448

barfoot 420

woman 398

man 342

day 302

widdowson 291

time 281

Answer: The Odd Women by George Gissing

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

en 344

de 298

tom 293

wilson 221

make 163

dat 155

man 129

time 120

good 102

house 102

Can you identify this work? Find out next week!

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.