I now have counts for the number of books a word appears in, as well as the number of times it appeared. Just as I hoped, it gives a new perspective on a lot of the questions we looked at already. That telephone-telegraph-railroad chart, in particular, has a lot of interesting differences. But before I get into that, probably later today, I want to step back and think about what we can learn from the contrast between between wordcounts and bookcounts. (I'm just going to call them bookcounts--I hope that's a clear enough phrase).
Roughly, wordcounts are how many times a word is said in my library, and bookcounts is how many different authors are saying it--or how many different readers are reading it. (Given prolific authors, multiple authors, etc. that's not quite true, but it's still an OK way to think about it). Since this is a quantitative blog, let's start with a chart. Here are the two different counts simply plotted against each other (please someone e-mail me if these image files don't come through as well as the earlier ones):
Each of the 200,000 points is a word--from "the," all the way up in the upper right hand corner, to a whole morass of words we've all forgotten and typos, down in the lower left. The red line is the theoretical minimum-- a word appearing in exactly as many books as is its word count.* This is abstract, I know, so let's add some of the words we've already been analyzing to the chart to humanize it a little. (By the time we get through with this, my little linguistic studies the last few entries will have taken us back to history, I promise).
