Work of the Week: Week 2

Work of the Week

Welcome to Week Two 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. The following 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 One’s “Work of the Week”. See if you guessed right!:

man 510

scout 374

eye 349

heyward 343

duncan 303

make 294

indian 281

place 251

uncas 244

long 242

Answer: The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

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

joe 746

look 740

mr 711

think 515

hand 476

time 466

man 374

little 371

pip 342

old 322

Can you identify this work? Come back next week to see if you guessed right!

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.