The L-Space Web: Analysis

This work was conducted by someone occasionally called Robert during the last few years in order to satisfy the fans' desire for information regarding deeply moving developments within the DW series, concerning topics like length of the books, and numbers paragraphs and footnotes. You should not ask annoying questions like "why would anybody sit down and count all these words" but just appreciate this hitherto hidden statistical view on Terry's work.

You are free to use the enclosed information for non-commercial purposes, as long as you give this L-space net-page as reference. In scientific works I'd like to be properly cited (vanity, I assume and ask for your pardon). If you wish to use this information for commercial purposes you need to ask permission first.

Disclaimer

As far as I know, Terry Pratchett has not published any book, apart from "Theatre of Cruelty", in electronic form. This work of statistics does not mean in any way that I possess illegal electronic copies of the DW series or other writing of Pterry. Hence, don't ask me for a copy.

General remarks

If you don't like all this reading, just look at the pictures. They are pretty self-explaining.

This work covers some statistical aspects on Pterry's DW books up to and including TOT and TAMAHER but excluding TLH.

Accuracy: I did my very best to get the correct numbers. However, you cannot rely on this information (that is, you are free to recount :-) to be more accurate than 1 in 1000 for the greater numbers, 1 in 100 for smaller ones and even small numbers may be off by one or two.

What was counted: The numbers are valid for the whole book except the title but including subtitle (as in TCOM, Pyramids or SM). Author's notes and dedications are not considered part of a book (count them for yourself), but the intro in L&L is. Everything else should be (i.e. is considered by me to be :-) fairly obvious.

Graphics: The short stories and novels were counted but not represented in the graphics, because they distort the picture and make it harder to see any trends. They are not really part of any development in length etc. anyway. Not represented are: the short stories Troll Bridge, Theatre of Cruelty and The Sea and Little Fishes, and the short novels (novelettes?) Eric and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

The graphics use normalised numbers, i.e. the actual number was divided by the biggest (or in some cases the smallest) number, resulting in numbers between 0 and 1. If you prefer, multiply them with 100 to obtain percentages. By doing this I was able to fit comparable items, like length in terms of number of characters and length in terms of number of words, in the same diagram although the absolute numbers are quite different.

Finally: Even though I restrained myself and did not add too much interpretation, never forget that you should only very hesitantly trust a statistic that you didn't manipulate yourself!

Normalised length of the books

Due to all those different editions (hardcover, old Corgi, new Corgi, American and Australian ones etc.) it is not possible to compare numbers of pages or lines (I can't afford to buy 'em all in the new Corgi format just to count lines :-). Instead the (hopefully) constant numbers of words and characters [*] were used.

Figure 1

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	307274	297129	14286	300400	331785	364272	387908	399963	453879	5484
3	0.63	0.61	0.03	0.62	0.68	0.75	0.80	0.82	0.93	0.01
4	66014	64371	3242	66260	73018	79222	85583	87931	98530	1243
5	0.61	0.60	0.03	0.62	0.68	0.74	0.80	0.82	0.92	0.01

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	160925	445217	360560	369779	411903	402190	431711	431580	428415	387411
3	0.33	0.92	0.74	0.76	0.85	0.83	0.89	0.89	0.88	0.80
4	34924	97288	78933	81614	91543	89017	94726	96139	93473	85391
5	0.33	0.91	0.73	0.76	0.85	0.83	0.88	0.90	0.87	0.80

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	61238	424453	428310	476792	441270	433707	486097	473408	460096	283276
3	0.13	0.87	0.88	0.98	0.91	0.89	1.00	0.97	0.95	0.58
4	13514	94164	95180	105197	98407	94902	107406	105088	102477	63779
5	0.13	0.88	0.89	0.98	0.92	0.88	1.00	0.98	0.95	0.59

Surprisingly (to me at least) there is no more or less steady climb in the length. Rather, the 7a^th novel, G!G! is among the longest, almost followed by one of the shortest (the 10^th, RM, is as short as the 5^th, Sourcery), and not surpassed before book no. 24, TFE!).

The two lines should match exactly. That they don't is caused by the average length of word varying between 4.48 (CJ) and 4.65 (TCOM) characters per word, a difference of almost 4%. The short stories TB and TOC show far lower values still!)! Obviously, Terry's language changes from book to book. Someone looking for a thesis could give it a look...

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	4.65	4.62	4.41	4.53	4.54	4.60	4.53	4.55	4.61	4.41
3	1.00	0.99	0.95	0.97	0.98	0.99	0.97	0.98	0.99	0.95

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	4.61	4.58	4.57	4.53	4.50	4.52	4.56	4.49	4.58	4.54
3	0.99	0.98	0.98	0.97	0.97	0.97	0.98	0.96	0.98	0.97

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	4.53	4.51	4.50	4.53	4.48	4.57	4.53	4.50	4.49	4.44
3	0.97	0.97	0.97	0.97	0.96	0.98	0.97	0.97	0.96	0.95

[*] This will present a problem should I ever do Good Omens, as there actually is a difference in length between the English and the American edition (see one of the last annotations for that book). As I don't know of other changes for the American market, nothing else is taken into account.

Normalised numbers of paragraphs and sub-chapters

A sub-chapter is the text body between two empty lines (sometimes filled with one or three asterisks "*"). When you look at TAMAHER (or the non-DW books), where there are true chapters that are still segmented further, the labelling becomes more obvious.

Admittedly, the number of paragraphs belongs to the length of the books (fig. 1) rather than here, but if I include it in fig. 1 it gets all messed up while fig. 3 is rather empty.

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	79	77	4	60	56	73	95	112	115	4
3	0.41	0.39	0.02	0.31	0.29	0.37	0.49	0.57	0.59	0.02
4	2558	3185	190	2884	3538	3894	4198	4042	4732	64
5	0.42	0.53	0.03	0.48	0.59	0.64	0.69	0.67	0.78	0.01

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	58	150	125	144	137	122	146	196	110	117
3	0.30	0.77	0.64	0.74	0.70	0.63	0.75	1.00	0.56	0.60
4	1738	5372	4982	4610	5377	5331	5866	6044	5291	4964
5	0.29	0.89	0.82	0.76	0.89	0.88	0.97	1.00	0.88	0.82

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	14	111	111	107	95	75	89	82	102	49
3	0.07	0.57	0.57	0.55	0.49	0.38	0.46	0.42	0.52	0.25
4	715	4996	5400	5922	5144	4773	5519	5217	5088	2885
5	0.12	0.83	0.89	0.98	0.85	0.79	0.91	0.86	0.84	0.48

The number of paragraphs rises steadily till MP (no. 10) and then more or less stays constant.

The number of sub-chapters on the other hand reaches an all-time high (by more than 20 %) at the 16^th novel (SM) and than quickly falls down again.

Relative length of the paragraphs and sub-chapters

As we know there are no chapters in the DW books, except for TCOM and Pyramids, and lately TAMAHER. Not even I am willing to do statistics on a sample of three, so I regarded the chapters as sub-chapters for the purpose of fig. 2.

The number of paragraphs and sub-chapters can be expected to rise along with the length of the book. So here we see these numbers divided by the number of characters, thus giving the relative length of the paragraphs and sub-chapters on average [*]:

We see that the length of paragraphs quite continually falls till SM and then slowly but steadily rises again.

The relative length of the sub-chapters varies far more with a maximum in Mort but almost reaching that level again in the latest novels.

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	3939	3910	4762	5092	6032	5059	4127	3603	3981	1828
3	0.65	0.65	0.79	0.84	1.00	0.84	0.68	0.60	0.66	0.30
4	120	93	75	104	94	94	92	99	96	86
5	1.00	0.78	0.63	0.87	0.78	0.78	0.77	0.82	0.80	0.71

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	2823	2988	2908	2586	3029	3324	2977	2213	3930	3340
3	0.47	0.50	0.48	0.43	0.50	0.55	0.49	0.37	0.65	0.55
4	93	83	72	80	77	75	74	71	81	78
5	0.77	0.69	0.60	0.67	0.64	0.63	0.61	0.59	0.67	0.65

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	4711	3859	3894	4498	4694	5861	5524	5845	4555	5902
3	0.78	0.64	0.65	0.75	0.78	0.97	0.92	0.97	0.76	0.98
4	86	85	79	81	86	91	88	91	90	98
5	0.71	0.71	0.66	0.67	0.71	0.76	0.73	0.76	0.75	0.82

[*] Technically you could divide the number of paragraphs and sub-chapters by the number of words, too, because, as we have seen in fig 1, it is not exactly proportional to the number of characters. However, the difference is too small as to make any difference, so to speak.

Footnotes

Everybody likes them. The one-liner, the two-liner, the longer explanations... Always good for a laugh or a smile, a chuckle or even what the ardent fans call a ROTFLKAS [*]. I love them.

Reason enough to look for a development in the footnotes. Are they getting more, or less, or staying constant? I put some effort into researching this on a statistical basis.

To cut it short: I can show you nothing. For whatever I looked, the picture is always the same: No development, no trend, no correlation. It is presented below, since I had done it. But the worth is dubious, you may as well skip this section. Quite depressing for one who set out to discover hidden wonders in the world of numbers. Anytime soon now I will go looking for a real life (in addition to the one I am leading already :-).

Number of the footnotes

The first attempt to detect an ordering development in the footnotes was to research how many of them there are. But the number of footnotes varies quite erratically. Little is gained if we take the length of the books into account (i.e. divide the number of footnotes by the length of books measured in number of characters [*]):

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	1	5	1	1	12	25	24	33	24	1
3	0.02	0.11	0.02	0.02	0.27	0.57	0.55	0.75	0.55	0.02
4	1.51	7.77	30.85	1.51	16.43	31.56	28.04	37.53	24.36	80.45
5	0.03	0.16	0.62	0.03	0.33	0.64	0.57	0.76	0.49	1.63

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	13	29	19	24	10	44	24	30	25	9
3	0.30	0.66	0.43	0.55	0.23	1.00	0.55	0.68	0.57	0.20
4	37.22	29.81	24.07	29.41	10.92	49.43	25.34	31.20	26.75	10.54
5	0.75	0.60	0.49	0.59	0.22	1.00	0.51	0.63	0.54	0.21

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	0	16	26	18	14	24	21	14	15	4
3	0.00	0.36	0.59	0.41	0.32	0.55	0.48	0.32	0.34	0.09
4	0.00	16.99	27.32	17.11	14.23	25.29	19.55	13.32	14.64	6.27
5	0.00	0.34	0.55	0.35	0.29	0.51	0.40	0.27	0.30	0.13

The number of footnotes per word closely matches the number of footnotes per book, so this again provides no clue for any change in the master's mind. (May I suggest a thesis looking into possible differences in the number of footnotes in the "lighter" and more serious novels?)

A statistical trapdoor is TOC: it contains one footnote, but because it is so short it has the highest number of footnotes per word by far (for the normalisation he value for L&L was used).

Row 5 of the tables can be translated into "How many words there are in-between two footnotes", for your interest this is given below (obtained by dividing the number of words by the number of footnotes):

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	66014	12874	-	66260	6085	7922	3423	2665	4479	1243

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	2910	3355	3947	3265	9154	2023	3266	3205	3595	9488

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	-	5885	3661	5844	3954	7029	4670	7506	7320	15945

Total length of footnotes

OK, I thought, let's see if the picture changes, if I consider the total number of words and characters in the footnotes. Maybe changes in the length balance for changes in numbers... But, alas, nothing balances, see for yourself:

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	364	223	0	151	801	466	964	1345	688	18
3	0.22	0.13	0.00	0.09	0.48	0.28	0.58	0.81	0.41	0.01
4	1677	1140	0	734	3714	2186	4419	6342	3202	71
5	0.22	0.15	0.00	0.10	0.50	0.29	0.59	0.85	0.43	0.01

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	663	777	1128	925	207	1348	1165	1087	726	330
3	0.40	0.47	0.68	0.55	0.12	0.81	0.70	0.65	0.44	0.20
4	3189	3580	5546	4312	898	6214	5551	4940	3377	1575
5	0.43	0.48	0.74	0.58	0.12	0.83	0.74	0.66	0.45	0.21

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	0	615	1667	684	1312	770	547	577	657	155
3	0.00	0.37	1.00	0.41	0.79	0.46	0.33	0.35	0.39	0.09
4	0	2939	7492	3234	6023	3555	2525	2733	2864	641
5	0.00	0.39	1.00	0.43	0.80	0.47	0.34	0.36	0.38	0.09

Length of words in footnotes

The difference in the length of footnotes measured in words and characters is again [*] due to the differences in the length of the words. The differences are greater than for the total text (that is probably due to the smaller sample, but offers, of course, a wide field of interpretation :-), and generally, but not always, the word used in footnotes are longer then the ones used in the total text.

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	4.65	4.62	4.41	4.53	4.54	4.60	4.53	4.55	4.61	4.41
3	4.61	5.11	-	4.86	4.64	4.69	4.58	4.72	4.65	3.94
4	0.91	0.90	0.86	0.89	0.89	0.90	0.89	0.89	0.90	0.86
5	0.90	1.00	-	0.95	0.91	0.92	0.90	0.92	0.91	0.77

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	4.61	4.58	4.57	4.53	4.50	4.52	4.56	4.49	4.58	4.54
3	4.81	4.61	4.92	4.66	4.34	4.61	4.76	4.54	4.65	4.77
4	0.90	0.90	0.89	0.89	0.88	0.88	0.89	0.88	0.90	0.89
5	0.94	0.90	0.96	0.91	0.85	0.90	0.93	0.89	0.91	0.93

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	4.53	4.51	4.50	4.53	4.57	4.48	4.53	4.50	4.49	4.44
3	-	4.78	4.49	4.73	4.59	4.62	4.62	4.74	4.36	4.14
4	0.89	0.88	0.88	0.89	0.89	0.88	0.89	0.88	0.88	0.87
5	-	0.93	0.88	0.92	0.90	0.90	0.90	0.93	0.85	0.81

Average length of individual footnotes

While we are about it, let's see if there is a development in the length of the footnotes, even if it does not cancel out the development in their number. Let's see, if they tend to get one-liners, or long explanations of some Discworld detail or other.

Well, it is not the case. Firstly I had to leave out TCOM and ER for the graphics, because their only one but long footnote (you can see it in the table: Their footnote is 5.5 respective 2.4 times longer then the next-highest average) just distort the picture. Secondly, the highest averages (Mort, RM and Hogfather) are about three times higher than the shortest (SG and TFE). Thirdly, not a trace of a trend is recognisable.

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	364	45	0	151	67	47	39	41	31	18
3	5.43	0.67	0.00	2.25	1.00	0.70	0.58	0.61	0.47	0.27
4	1677	228	0	734	310	219	177	192	146	71
5	5.41	0.74	0.00	2.37	1.00	0.71	0.57	0.62	0.47	0.23

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	55	27	56	37	21	31	40	36	28	37
3	0.82	0.40	0.84	0.55	0.31	0.46	0.60	0.54	0.42	0.55
4	266	123	277	172	90	141	191	165	130	175
5	0.86	0.40	0.89	0.56	0.29	0.46	0.62	0.53	0.42	0.56

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	0	38	64	38	55	55	24	41	47	39
3	0.00	0.57	0.96	0.57	0.82	0.82	0.35	0.62	0.70	0.58
4	0	184	288	180	251	254	110	195	205	160
5	0.00	0.59	0.93	0.58	0.81	0.82	0.35	0.63	0.66	0.52

Length of footnotes versus length of books

My last attempt to obtain insight in the footnote-topic was: to see if there is something less erratically to observe if I divide the number of words/characters in the total text by the number of words/characters in the footnotes only. I.e. how many times is the book (total text) longer than the footnotes.

Here at last there is at least something to be observed. The highest values by far show ER and SG, followed (if separated by a factor of two) by Maskerade. On the other end of the value-spectrum, there are ten books showing values between 0.1 and 0.2.

I leave the interpretation to you, just bear in mind that a high value equals a high text-to-footnote-ratio, i.e. few footnotes.

1	TCOM	TLF	TB	ER	Mort	Sour	WS	Pyr	G!G!	TOC
2	181	289	0	439	91	170	89	65	143	69
3	0.41	0.65	0.00	0.99	0.21	0.38	0.20	0.15	0.32	0.16
4	183	261	0	409	89	167	88	63	142	77
5	0.40	0.57	0.00	0.89	0.19	0.36	0.19	0.14	0.31	0.17

1	Eric	MP	RM	WA	SG	LL	MAA	SM	IT	Mask
2	53	125	70	88	442	66	81	88	129	259
3	0.12	0.28	0.16	0.20	1.00	0.15	0.18	0.20	0.29	0.59
4	50	124	65	86	459	65	78	87	127	246
5	0.11	0.27	0.14	0.19	1.00	0.14	0.17	0.19	0.28	0.54

1	TSALF	FOC	Hogf	Jingo	CJ	TLC	TFE	TT	TOT	TAMA
2	0	153	57	154	72	128	196	182	156	411
3	0.00	0.35	0.13	0.35	0.16	0.29	0.44	0.41	0.35	0.93
4	0	144	57	147	72	124	193	173	161	442
5	0.00	0.31	0.12	0.32	0.16	0.27	0.42	0.38	0.35	0.96

Statistics

Author's note