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'.