sunil.page

Most common words

Friday, 24th July 2020 ◆ Schedule railway to leave stream (4) Linguistics  

I've picked three works of fiction which are freely available from Project Gutenberg, and extracted the 10 most common 6+ letter words from each.

Using only that list of words, can you guess what the novel is? Some may be more obvious than others!

Novel 1

1. prince
2. pierre
3. natásha
4. andrew
5. himself
6. princess
7. french
8. before
9. thought
10. rostóv

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

Novel 2

1. holmes
2. little
3. before
4. through
5. answered
6. should
7. ferrier
8. however
9. drebber
10. sherlock

A Study in Scarlett, Arthur Conan Doyle

Novel 3

1. little
2. herself
3. thought
4. hatter
5. gryphon
6. turtle
7. rabbit
8. looked
9. duchess
10. dormouse

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

---

Without the 6+ letter restriction, there are too many basic words (a, the, he, is) for a human to work out the novel.