I02 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cellent and entirely satisfactory manner in which the heavy task of 

 counting was performed by the ladies who undertook it, Mrs. Eichard 

 Mitchell and Miss Amy C. Whitman, of Worcester, Massachusetts. 

 Their intelligent interest in the problem itself, together with their 

 excellent knowledge of the various authors under examination and 

 familiarity with the literature of the Shakespearean period, contributed 

 greatly to the easy accomplishment of the work. The operation of 

 counting was greatly facilitated by the construction of a simple count- 

 ing machine by which a registration of a word of any given number of 

 letters was made by touching a button marked with that number. One 

 of the counters, with book in hand, called off 'five,' 'two,' 'three,' etc., 

 as rapidly as possible, counting the letters in each word carefully and 

 taking the words in their consecutive order, the other registering, as 

 called, by pressing the proper buttons. Practice enabled the counters to 

 do the work with remarkable rapidity, so that, although they were 

 occupied for several months, the total time required was really only 

 about one-quarter of the original estimate. The work was very ex- 

 hausting, however, and could not be kept up satisfactorily more than 

 three to five hours each day. After some preliminary work the counting 

 of Shakespeare was seriously begun, and the result from the start with 

 the first group of a thousand words was a decided surprise. Two things 

 appeared from the beginning: Shakespeare's vocabulary consisted of 

 words whose average length was a trifle below four letters, less than 

 that of any writer of English before studied; and his word of greatest 

 frequency was the four-letter word, a thing never met with before. His 

 preference for the four-letter word may be said, indeed, to constitute 

 the striking characteristic of his composition. At first it was thought 

 that it might be a general characteristic of the English of his time, but 

 that was found to be not the case. Its appearance in the composition 

 of one or two of his contemporaries will be considered presently. Alto- 

 gether about 400,000 words of Shakespeare were counted and classified, 

 including, in whole or in part, nearly all of his most famous plays. His 

 'characteristic curve' is most persistent, that based on the first 50,000 

 words differing very little from that of the whole count. Two groups 

 have been formed by combining alternate small groups (single plays or 

 parts of plays) in a purely mechanical way, so as to include as nearly 

 as may be the same number of words in each. The curves correspond- 

 ing to them are plotted in Fig. 4, where, however, the differences have 

 been of necessity somewhat exaggerated in order to make them show 

 at all. The practical identity of these curves must be regarded as con- 

 vincing evidence of the soundness of the original assumption. Not all 

 of the Shakespeare count was completed at one time; other authors 

 were taken up, and it is worth noting that the counters declared their 

 ability to recognize Shakespeare by the mere 'run of words' without 



