Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2008 November 10

= November 10 =

Software to analyse word usage
Hello. I'm sure there is a small app somewhere that will take a Word document and show how many times all the words occur. Anyone know where I can find it/one of these? Just to be clear for those of you who like to jump in immediately to these things without thinking, I don't mean a word-count, I mean a list of the incidence of all the words. Thanks FreeMorpheme (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 01:36, 10 November 2008 (UTC).


 * Someone else will point you in the direction of software for such a purpose, including concordancer software (see also here, for the use of such things in linguistic research). But if you want to find how many times just one item occurs in a Word document, search and replace the item (CONTROL-H is the best shortcut): replace it with itself, and Word will report to you how many times this was done.
 * – ⊥ ¡ɐɔıʇǝo  N  oetica! T– 02:40, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

If the doc is fairly small, and you have MS Excel, you could do something like the following: If the doc is big some of these steps might require too much memory. jnestorius(talk) 18:58, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) copy the doc to a new file
 * 2) search-replace all whitespace with a paragraph mark
 * 3) convert text to table (one column, call it EnglishWord)
 * 4) copy-paste the table to a new Excel spreadsheet
 * 5) sort the spreadsheet
 * 6) use the Data>Subtotals option: at each change in EnglishWord, use function Count
 * http://www.autocrit.com also has a incidence calculator for the most common words in the text, but I haven't checked if it is still free (it is dependent on the text size). - Mgm|(talk) 20:39, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

This software may be what you are seeking. I have never use it, but it is the one used to create the lexical statistics of Jean_Henri_Fabre's Souvenirs entomologiques here. The software operates on raw text files or HTML files; you can convert a Word document using "save as" and selecting the appropriate format. AldoSyrt (talk) 17:08, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Translation into English of letters written by Antoine Gaubil
Can any user please tell me whether any of the letters written in French by Antoine Gaubil, which appear in "Correspondance de Pekin, 1722-1759", have been translated into English, and if so, where can such an English translation be found? Thank you Simonschaim (talk) 11:28, 10 November 2008 (UTC)