Making a Word List

 

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To make a word list, first press the WordList button in the main Controller.        

 

 wordlist_button        

When WordList starts up, choose your texts and then you will see something like this.        

 

w_wizard_main_tab        

 

Here we're going to make one simple wordlist based on 8 text files from the play Romeo and Juliet, so press Make a word list now.        

 

wordlist_romeo_freq        

 

The WordList tool shows us a frequency listing. The most frequent word is "#". There are 985 of these #. Whatever has happened? Well, by default # is used to represent any number such as 65, 40 or $997.82. In this case we have line numbers in the source text.        

 

Below #, the most frequent words are the, and, I to, of. Beside each one you can see how frequent it is in the collection of 8 texts we used, the percentage of running words, and how many of our 8 texts each word occurred in. It seems I is a top frequency word but even so was not present in all the 8 texts.        

 

To see the words in alphabetical order instead, click the alphabetical tab near the bottom of the window.        

 

wherefore_in_wordlist        

 

Now scroll down to wherefore. The results seem to confirm what we found when we made a concordance.        

 

Page url: http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/step_by_step/?makingawordlist.htm