So what words make The Hounds of the Baskervilles sound like a Sherlock story?
For starter it features the two antiquated words “hath” and “zeal”.
It also has an absurdly large number of instances of “anyone” and “anything”. I think this has less to do with Conan Doyle’ls writing style and more to do with the nature of the mystery genre. Detectives tend to spend a lot of time asking questions about “Anyone who might have a grudge?” or “Did you notice anything else strange on the night of the murder?”
Other detective mystery words that showed up unusually often include:
- guess
- implicate
- incident
- inquiry
What about non-murder-mystery words?
Well, the story takes place on the Baskerville estates which include a massive “moor”, a tract of land considered too poor to be made into farmland and so instead left to grow wild. So in addition to constant use of the word “moor” itself we also get an excessive amount of words describing just how large and slightly spooky that moor is:
- bog
- bramble
- fog
- hill
- melancholy
- quagmires
In fact while the story is named after the hound the vast majority of the books is really dedicated to making the reader really understand the slightly sad and unsettling feeling of living next to and traveling through this giant patch of rocky swampy wilderness. This is very much so the story of a place as much as it is the story of any of the characters who live and die there.
