Good morning, Word Fans! Alert Reader SonofSaradoc asked the very straightforward question, “Where are the uncommon words?” Frankly, I just imagined that they would be scattered evenly throughout – thank you, SonofSaradoc, for saving me from that very poor bit of judgement! I ran Lexos with all the uncommon words tagged, and LOOK! Great news – when I use Lexos right on their web site, I can click on a particular point and get the exact number of the word in the middle of that point.
The clearest graph of this question is the rolling average graph with a window of 1000 words:
Sweet quaffle.
The very first low point – a place abundantly wealthy in Common words – is in the middle of this paragraph:
[01.004] The mother of our particular hobbit – what is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us.
Prosaic, common, everyday, ordinary words. Workhorse words. You can tell what these words would say on any question without the bother of asking them. These beautiful, common words are our gateway into Middle Earth, ten furry toes solidly on familiar ground.
The first uncommon words in the novel are at 01.002, “porthole”, “knob”, “tunnel”, and “fond”.
UPDATE 2015.06.13 There was a grievous error in my method, Word Fans, as reviewed in my post on Constant Vigilance! I’ve removed any tags from this post so that only you good folks who are reading chronologically will see this little detour into error.
words that you were saying 
Does each uncommon word have a rating for how uncommon it is? Could you graph not just by number of uncommon words, but by average uncommonality, per passage? I have a hypothesis, but not a conviction, that the graph would be smoother.
Grace
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Grace – yes. Each word could be given its raw rank in the frequency list as its “Uncommonality Score.” I will add this to the list of future possibilities on the “Ever On” page!
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