Language Data

Lafferty's published fiction comprises roughly 2,836,500 words and features around 80,000 unique word forms. What stands out is the remarkable lexical richness, which contributes significantly to the informational density of his work.

Some of the Most Frequent Words in the Corpus:

said (13,799), man (8,089), world (6,357), like (6,251), know (5,994), people (5,767), little (5,304), time (5,162), old (4,392), things (4,162), come (3,935), just (3,766), oh (3,719), way (3,394), asked (3,263), good (3,194), came (3,084), years (2,996), men (2,956), it’s (2,917), great (2,806), new (2,792), really (2,742), day (2,715), went (2,629), make (2,492), yes (2,481), right (2,391), believe (2,329), say (2,241), long (2,189), dead (2,171), big (2,111), place (2,067), Duffey (1,997), person (1,992), told (1,964), persons (1,940), Finnegan (1,889), I’m (1,888), going (1,888), left (1,870), life (1,849), tell (1,845), knew (1,823), night (1,809), look (1,753), real (1,720), young (1,710), quite (1,691), want (1,675), let (1,641), sure (1,640), eyes (1,611), Dana (1,591), high (1,589), think (1,575), got (1,568), away (1,517).

Average Words Per Sentence

Highest:

• The Fall of Rome (20.8)

• Half a Sky (18.0)

• The Reefs of Earth (17.4)

• Okla Hannali (16.6)

• Apocalypses (16.1)

• Serpent’s Egg (15.9)

• Sindbad, The Thirteenth... (15.4)

• Annals of Klepsis (15.3)

• Not to Mention Camels (15.0)

• The Elliptical Grave (14.0)

  
  

Lowest:

• Space Chantey (11.6)

• Dotty (11.8)

• Fourth Mansions (11.8)

• The Devil Is Dead (12.5)

• Archipelago  (12.9)

• Past Master (12.9)

• The Man Who Talled Tales:... (13.0)

• Arrive at Easterwine (13.2)

• Aurelia (13.2)

• The Flame Is Green (13.6)

  
  

Readability Index (Coleman-Liau)

Highest:

• Half a Sky (13.411)

• Arrive at Easterwine (9.688)

• Space Chantey (9.487)

• The Elliptical Grave (9.387)

• Sindbad, The Thirteenth (9.380)

• The Fall of Rome (9.052)

• Fourth Mansions (8.984)

• The Flame Is Green (8.960)

• Serpent’s Egg (8.740)

• Okla Hannali (8.018)

  
  

Lowest:

• Not to Mention Camels (4.885)

• The Devil Is Dead (6.446)

• Archipelago (6.484)

• The Reefs of Earth (7.029)

• Annals of Klepsis (7.045)

• Past Master (7.173)

• Dotty (7.211)

• Apocalypses (7.278)

• More Than Melchisedech (7.723)

  
  

Longer sentences usually indicate more complex sentence structures, while readability scores measure how difficult a text is to decode based on word and sentence length, not conceptual depth. Comparing both gives you a rough sense of which novels have more intricate sentence construction and which are more mechanically accessible, though this doesn't do much to account for interesting forms of narrative complexity.

For example, it's amusing that—knowing nothing else but the readability index—this would make Not to Mention Camels the one to hand the kids.