ShakeWords: Shakespeare's Word Type Frequencies

In vcdExtra: 'vcd' Extensions and Additions

Shakespeare's Word Type Frequencies

Description

This data set, from Efron and Thisted (1976), gives the number of distinct words types (Freq) of words that appeared exactly once, twice, etc. up to 100 times (count) in the complete works of Shakespeare. In these works, Shakespeare used 31,534 distinct words (types), comprising 884,647 words in total.

Format

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

count

the number of times a word type appeared in Shakespeare's written works

Freq

the number of different words (types) appearing with this count.

Details

Efron & Thisted used this data to ask the question, "How many words did Shakespeare know?" Put another way, suppose another new corpus of works Shakespeare were discovered, also with 884,647 words. How many new word types would appear? The answer to the main question involves contemplating an infinite number of such new corpora.

In addition to the words that appear 1:100 times, there are 846 words that appear more than 100 times, not listed in this data set.

Source

Bradley Efron and Ronald Thisted (1976). Estimating the Number of Unseen Species: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know? Biometrika, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 435-447, %http://www.jstor.org/stable/2335721

Examples

data(ShakeWords)
str(ShakeWords)

plot(sqrt(Freq) ~ count, data=ShakeWords)

vcdExtra documentation built on Dec. 11, 2025, 9:06 a.m.