Question

One of the problems of scale in writing a book is that you can't keep track of how often you use unusual words. For example, "perpetual" is a good word. I like to use it now and then in articles, but I try not to use it more than once in an article. If I read over an article enough times before submitting it, I'll likely notice I've used "perpetual" too often and fix it. Likewise, I have some favorite words, like "Indeed" (which I got long ago from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and have a tendency to badly overuse.

But, there's no way you can do that at book scale. Therefore, I'm wondering if there are reliable software programs out there for building "concordances." A concordance is a list of all the words used in, say, the Bible or in Shakespeare. I'd like to be able to get a list of each word used in my book and its frequency of appearance. Then I could sort the words in order of frequency. I'd ignore the simple word like "the" at the top of the list and I'd ignore the one-time use words at the bottom of the list. I'd look for things like "strikingly" appears 14 times in the book. That's too often.

So, doesn't anybody a way to make a concordance out of an MS Word document?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer