Reading by Numbers
Drop a book onto this page as a plain-text file and it counts the words: which ones the book leans on, which ones other writers rarely use, and how the language changes from chapter to chapter.
The report below is an example, for K. J. Parker's Colours in the Steel. Drop another book's text file into the box to get its report instead. Free, out-of-copyright books are available as plain text from Project Gutenberg: on a book's page, choose "Plain Text UTF-8" and save the file.
The counting is built for novels in English. Other long texts work too, but the chapter and dialogue measures are designed around fiction.
Drop a book here as a .txt file, or
The file stays on your computer. Everything is counted inside this page and nothing is uploaded.
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Works Cited
4 sources
- Dunning, Ted. "Accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and Coincidence." Computational Linguistics, vol. 19, no. 1, 1993, pp. 61–74.
- Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, www.gutenberg.org.
- Speer, Robyn. wordfreq. Version 3.1.1, GitHub, github.com/rspeer/wordfreq.
- Zipf, George Kingsley. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley, 1949.