Work of the Week: Week 5

Work of the Week

Welcome to Week Five 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 Four’s “Work of the Week”. See if you guessed right!:

en 344

de 298

tom 293

wilson 221

make 163

dat 155

man 129

time 120

good 102

house 102

Answer: The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

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

ago 341

haue 206

cassio 194

oth 182

des 160

oh 117

shall 93

lord 91

tis 88

t 88

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.