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

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November 10

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Software to analyse word usage

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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).[reply]

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.
¡ɐɔıʇǝoNoetica!T02:40, 10 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If the doc is fairly small, and you have MS Excel, you could do something like the following:

  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

If the doc is big some of these steps might require too much memory. jnestorius(talk) 18:58, 10 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]


This software [1] 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)[reply]

Translation into English of letters written by Antoine Gaubil

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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)[reply]