Words words words

I saw this on Lydia Joyce’s blog and couldn’t resist.

It’s a word frequency program from Georgetown. You enter the text, and see how many unique words are in the block of text, as well as the frequency with which each word is used.

Secret Society Girl has 80,000 words, and over 10,000 unique words. Lydia reported that Pride and Prejudice has 6,800 unique words in 121,000 words and Wuthering Heights has 9,500 /116,000. Since I don’t write historical romances, I feel like I need a Devil Wear’s Prada or a Bridget Jones’s Diary to compare it to.

The top twenty most frequently used words are: THE, I, TO, A, AND, OF, IN, WAS, MY, YOU, THAT, IT, ME, HE, ON, WITH, AT, FOR, HIS, and AS.

The bottom twenty (i.e., least frequently used) are: Uberhot, wunderkind, Romantic, thingamajig, whoopee, yellow, rejections, girlfriend, yup, toodleoo, sidebar, rustication, yen, wizened, windbreaker, vestments, wannabe, wobbled, workaday, and zest.

Of course, I think they arrange it alphabetically after frequency, and they seem to have a problem with quotation marks in the program, so both the count and the list might be highly inaccurate (Which I think is definitely the point with “girlfriend” ’cause Amy — and others –uses that all the time.) But, it’s interesting anyway.

If you’re a writer, paste in your latest work and report the results here!