Today's word cloud: "The Monkey's Paw" - W.W. Jacobs

"Without, the night was cold and wet(...)" 

With this alternative (oldfashioned?) meaning to the word 'outside', W.W. Jacobs gives a well-deserved atmospheric introduction to his gothic masterpiece. And that dictates the tone of how things are going do develop (to the worse) in the very few pages that follow within this classic horror short story.

And if you call yourself a fan of the horror genre and haven't taken the (very short) time to read this tale yet, set aside a similarly cold and rainy evening you happen to be at home to read it in the dim light.
Then come back and let me know how delightful (actually, frightful) your reading experience was. Enough said about how great this story is, let us proceed to the word cloud itself:

If like me, you read it umpteen times before (I actually took it to the next step, as I told it, lights off and all, to several of my pupils aged 9 to 12 and boy, they loved it!), its most frequent words are not much of a surprise, are they?

So it's either down to it being a short story or the fact it's so direct to the point, the words do reflect what goes on in the plot. Or would you rather wish there were some other ones? Just remember to be careful with what you wish for...

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, THE word cloud

Halloa! What have we here, dear chap? Well, were I to have relinquished this post's title, you would still -  by not just seeing, but observing - be quite able to infer whose word cloud it happens to be from, so blatantly obvious it is!

I shall stress out the meaningful employment of words that appear in Sherlock Holmes's first dozen short stories, such as 'think', 'time' and 'know'.

Alas, certain words we'd have taken for granted showed up in abundance, like 'clues'  and 'crime' are nothing but irrelevant. Also, words which may give in their being used more frequently during those old Victorian times (shall, quite, etc.) do abound in this anthology. And, who would guess it, 'fact(s)' are not that prominent either!

Most frequent words in Moby Dick

Well, not much of a surprise with this one, as the most-repeated words through its 600-plus pages correspond more or less to what most would expect.

Though the verb 'seem' seems (yep, the pun was intentional) to be used quite frequently in this kind of yarn. Since Ishmael, being a semi-diegetic narrator, gives the reader his first-hand impressions, mostly. 

Finally, it's worth noting, the word 'whale' appears three times as much as 'man'.

Most frequent words in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula':

Some conclusions one can draw out of this Dracula word cloud are:

 Firstly, as one might expect, the word 'night' appears more frequently than 'day' (duh!).
Also, Van Helsing's name has a higher word-count than Jonathan's fiancée, Mina's (322 times against 237). On top of that, if you add up the reference 'the professor' when used on its own without being followed by his name (111 of them); the total of references to the vampire killer amount to hefty 333 times!

It's also worth mentioning that in all its 237-occurrence glory, Mina's name actually appears less frequently than that of Lucy's (299 times).

Finally, 'blood' is not so common a word as we might come to believe, with 107 samplings. Well, okay then, that's quite a lot still.

Most frequent words used in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

Upon reading this world-celebrated work by British author  Mary Shelley, I was struck by the frequent use of the adjective  'wretched' (along with its variances 'wretchedly', 'wretchedness' and of course, the 'wretch' noun) as it is nowadays, not-so-spread out and commonly-used a word. 

By using the excellent 'Tagul Cloud Generator' with the full text to the renowned novel available on Project Gutenberg, I was fairly surprised to find out the word in question wasn't even among the 100-most frequent ones in this novel and, if anything, it probably stands out in Shelley's work more down to its strangeness in our present times than to its sheer number of repeats in the text. So I decided to increase Tagul's maximum threshold to 250 and see if it finally showed up. Can you find it? Let us know in the comment session if you did and in which part of the "Frankie face"'s anatomy above you did.


As to important in the whole text, 'man', 'father', 'life' are, in my opinion, no-brainers. But 'friend' and 'love' though, after reading it several years ago, I can still recall most occasions where they were employed in the book, seem a tad out-of-place, don't they?