After removing The Ten Thousand most common words in written British English from the approximately 96,000 words of The Hobbit,  I took out those words such as “immeasurable” which are in the Ten Thousand when stripped to their base word (“measure”).  I had earlier reported the total remaining words as “Seven Thousand and Change“.  Since then I’ve spotted a few more words to eliminate for being common words with extra syllables.

At the moment, there are 7172, although that number may move a bit still.  We have entries for 1618 of them; 2,360 original Middle Earth words such as names are being held aside for later consideration.  So, for the remaining words, I plan to focus first on archaic and rare words, and poetical words and perhaps funny words because those seem to be the ones showing patterns of use.  I will certainly also take pleasure in finishing all the entries of a particular letter just for that satisfaction, and I have planned one or two more grammar explorations such as “be-” prefixes.

My technical support person (thank you, my son) will be able and willing to help me with the Lexomics portion of our analysis in June, therefore the focus on those words first.