A Brief Statistical Look at Blood Meridian

A Brief Statistical Look at Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Last Revised On August 15, 2006
Copyright © 2006 - Christopher Forbis

In creating a complete concordance for the book Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy I gathered several interesting statistics that bring to light several characteristics of the book that are otherwise lost to the reader. By stripping the book down to it's bare words and their occurrences I have found the following:

The book, although only 334 pages of text, contains 10,257 individual unique words. Some of these words occur on nearly every page but a large percentage occur only once within the text. In fact, 5,308 words occur only once in the book representing nearly 52% of the unique words used to create this masterpiece.

Not only does this number appear surprisingly high for a book originally written on a typewriter, but the distribution of singularly used words is relatively consistent throughout the whole book when examined by chapter.

Could this be a window into the style or process used by the author or is it just a side-effect of the writing talent. I plan to continue my examination of McCarthy's other work by the same method in search of a mathematical "finger print" that may be consistent across multiple works by the same author or may be able to predict the re-readability of a literary work.

Below are some of the data from my ongoing work with Blood Meridian.

Christopher Forbis

Chap Num	Raw Word Count	Number of Unique Words in Chapter	Number of Words in the Chapter that Occur Only Once in Book	Num Pages in Chap	Average Number of Unique Words Per Page in the Chapter	Average "Words Used Once In Book" Averaged Per Page in Chapter	Average Word Count per Page	Percentage of Unique Words in the Chap that Occur Only Once in the Book
1	4158	1152	190	12	96.00	15.83	96.00	16.49%
2	4653	1219	163	13	93.77	12.54	93.77	13.37%
3	4164	1159	180	14	82.79	12.86	82.79	15.53%
4	4663	1409	233	13	108.38	17.92	108.38	16.54%
5	6743	1646	279	19	86.63	14.68	86.63	16.95%
6	2060	804	104	7	114.86	14.86	114.86	12.94%
7	6362	1685	331	19	88.68	17.42	88.68	19.64%
8	2560	793	89	8	99.13	11.13	99.13	11.22%
9	4818	1416	242	14	101.14	17.29	101.14	17.09%
10	5206	1199	214	14	85.64	15.29	85.64	17.85%
11	5460	1418	263	15	94.53	17.53	94.53	18.55%
12	5522	1457	198	15	97.13	13.20	97.13	13.59%
13	7336	1958	412	20	97.90	20.60	97.90	21.04%
14	6391	1785	365	18	99.17	20.28	99.17	20.45%
15	6970	1580	273	19	83.16	14.37	83.16	17.28%
16	6407	1671	250	18	92.83	13.89	92.83	14.96%
17	5238	1535	320	15	102.33	21.33	102.33	20.85%
18	988	423	42	4	105.75	10.50	105.75	9.93%
19	6043	1607	302	17	94.53	17.76	94.53	18.79%
20	6249	1355	206	18	75.28	11.44	75.28	15.20%
21	3204	963	143	10	96.30	14.30	96.30	14.85%
22	4133	1205	192	11	109.55	17.45	109.55	15.93%
23	6786	1620	296	20	81.00	14.80	81.00	18.27%
Ep.	208	111	21	1	111.00	21.00	111.00	18.92%
		(Not Totaled)
Totals	116,322	10,257	5,308	334

Book	116,322	10,257	5,308	334	30.71	15.89	30.71	51.75%