I was bored...

And hopped into Scrivener and checked out the word statistics... the manuscript is 120,738 words.

12 words are used more than 1000 times, those twelve make up 31,774 words.

In order of appearances: The, and, a, to, of, his, in, her, he, but, she, and with make up roughly 1/4 of the words used.

"The" is 6.39% of the book. Not shocking as it is the #1 word according to wikipedia at 7% usage on average.

One of my pet peeve words "that" I manage to only use 345 times, or 0.28%.

The number of words I only used once was too big to count, I was not that bored, LOL.

So, any other folks been bored enough to look at these things? And is there somewhere a statistical analysis of word usage in prose? Insane minds want to know, LOL.

 

Masochist, LOL.

-LY words, this is more complex, because I assume looking for adverbs, but not all -ly words are adverbs. So, while "ly" appears 560 times, I suspect -ly adverbs ring in around 1/2-3000 words including dialogue, maybe even less...but hard to say as a whole. The first 5600ish contains 1 -ly adverb and that's in dialogue, while there are 21 additional words ending in -ly. Religion is prominent, so holy eliminates 68 of the 560.

Next time I'm bored I might check the -ly in detail, LOL. Sick statistic disease.

The words actually, very, suddenly, quickly, do not appear, LOL.

 

Computers and their analytics make these weird tasks possible, that's for sure.

 

A lower "the" count could be a good thing. It's easy to over use that little bugger and a serious pain in the tush to go through all of them to see which are necessary, LOL.

One tricky thing in the count is that "be" is one of the most used words in English BUT they count all forms of "be" as "be" I think.

"that" is damned near addictive... and to bring in another conversation, so many authors will italicize that for emphasis... oh dear God nooooooo! LOL. me and that, it's a hate/love relationship.