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January 21, 2005

Strange But True!

Q. Some of Shakespeare's plays, it was claimed, were actually authored by contemporary Francis Bacon. How did stylometry or stylostatistics settle this old question?

A. Word frequency analysis showed "significant difference" between the two writers, says David Crystal in "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language." One method is to list the 50 commonest words in all available texts of each author, then to compare the results.


 
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