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!
November 23rd, 2005 at 10:41 am
Oooo…pretty cool tool! I tried this with two of my stories:
My women’s fiction that I just finished is: Word count: 85962
Unique words: 10956 and my category romance is: Word count: 55816 Unique words: 7299
Thanks for posting this!
= )
November 23rd, 2005 at 4:47 pm
Very interesting. I entered my novel, Sword Across Time, which is a mythical fantasy, and ended up with this:
Word count: 114351
Unique words: 8328
I’ll have to try some of my unpublished manuscripts.
Cathy
November 23rd, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I plugged in my NaNo so far and got this:
Word count: 37183
Unique words: 5407
I’m trying to be more creative in my word use. I spent years as a tech and medical writer, dumbing down my writing to fit those industries. Now, that huge vocabulary I used to have is pretty rusty, but I’m really getting going on my NaNo ms. :G: Hope I’m not overdoing it, but this is NaNo, so it’s not supposed to be perfect.
November 26th, 2005 at 7:57 pm
Word count: 41069
Unique words: 6592
I don’t know what that means.
Julie
November 29th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Hmm. I don’t remember using the word “zesty” in my second book but apparently I did…