bard {SMPracticals}

Shakespeare's Word Type Frequencies

Description

These are the frequencies with which Shakespeare used word types. There are 846 word types which appear more than 100 times in his total works, giving an overall total of 31534 word types.

Usage

data(bard)

Format

A data frame with 100 observations on the following 2 variables.

r

Number of times a word type is used

n

Number of word types used r times

Details

The canon of Shakespeare's accepted works contains 884,647 words, with 31,534 distinct word types. A word type is a distinguishable arrangement of letters, so ‘king’ is different from ‘kings’ and ‘alehouse’ different from both ‘ale’ and ‘house’.

Source

Efron, B. and Thisted, R. (1976) Estimating the number of unseen species: How many words did Shakespeare know? Biometrika, 63, 435–448.

Thisted, R. and Efron, B. (1987 ) Did Shakespeare write a newly-discovered poem? Biometrika, 74, 445–455.

References

Davison, A. C. (2003) Statistical Models. Cambridge University Press. Page 629.