A Quantitative Study on Word-Length Distribution of William Shakespeare’s Literary Works
Ying Feng, Li Liu, Yue Yu, Ning Cai · 2024
This study investigates word-length distribution in William Shakespeare's literary works, spanning various genres such as sonnet, long narrative poem, and play. The research focuses on revealing patterns and potential divergence of word-length distribution within each genre. The results show that the best-fitting distribution for all works belongs to the family of binomial distribution or the family of Poisson distribution. Respectively, sonnet is the Dacey-negative binomial distribution, long narrative poem, and play (tragedy) are the hyper-pascal distribution, and play (comedy) is the mixed Poisson distribution. However, the variance in word-length distribution among genres or works is slight.