I recently compared Mary Shelly’s word choices for Frankenstein to the average word frequencies found across an average of all modern-ish (1990-2005) books and discovered dozens upon dozens of “unusual” words that helped shape the unique tone of her story. It seems obvious that some of these words reflect Frankenstein gothic horror genre while others reflect its early 1800 publication date, but how can we tell which is which?
With a little bit of math, of course.
The same Google Book data source that we used to calculate our modern word frequencies also offers data reaching centuries into the past. That means that we can fairly easily calculate the word frequencies for the average book from around the same time as Frankenstein. Between 1810 and 1830 seems like a nice range.
After tabulating up that data we can now compare Mary Shelly’s writings not just to modern trends but to her fellow writers from the early 1800s. This allows for a more data based way to determine which parts of Frankenstein’s unique tone come from its era rather than it’s genre. Is a certain word unusually rare compared to modern usage but about right compared to the 1800s? Then it’s an “old” word. Otherwise if it is rare compared to both sets then we can safely conclude that is either a genre word or a representation of Shelly’s unique style.
With that out of the way here are some highlighted “old” words that were found in Frankenstein at least 10 times more often than in modern writing but less than 2 times more often when compared to other books from that time period. Interestingly enough none of my gut instinct “old timey” words from the previous analysis made the cut:
- Adorned
- Gentleman
- Honourable
- Pleasing
- Sentiments
- Trifling
- Zeal
The list overall was actually quite short (only 53 words), suggesting that overall what makes Frankenstein stand out has relatively little to do with it’s age and much more to do with Mary Shelly’s unique style and her contribution to the Gothic Horror genre.
