Vocabulary Blog

Janet Evanovich is to the New York Times Best Seller list what Cliff Clavin is to Cheers.   If the NYT Best Seller list was a bar, the number-one stool would be perfectly molded to the shape of Evanovich’s buttox.
Wow, that reference made me feel old.

I don’t want to exclude contemporary writers from analysis, even though it is slightly more difficult to obtain the texts for their works.

I took a look at the first ten books of Janet Evanovich’s Plum series (the one where all the titles start with a number).  I made a table comparing the total number of words and the total number of unique words.

Overall she seems fairly consistent. The books are typically around 80,000 words, and have a vocabulary of 6500 words.  However, there is a noticeable drop off in vocabulary between the third and fourth book.  Maybe she lost her thesaurus.

Since I still have some Mark Twain handy, I’ll first compare her books to one of his works.  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is similiar in length and weighs in at 74,000 words, 7600 of which are unique.  That vocabulary isn’t much more than one of Evanovich’s books.

Next I’ll try a British author, like Charles Dickens.  It was difficult to find a book of his of comparable size.  I finally settled upon one of his non-fiction books, Pictures from Italy.  Even at only 75,000 words its vocabulary weighs in at 9100!  Just for fun I’ll look at another British book, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights which packs in a vocabulary of 9500 words.

I don’t like to jump to conclusions with such a small sample size, but it does seem that the British do know the English best.