Jesus' vocabulary
The Blog of Nathan D. Smith
A friend of mine asked if I had a list of all of Jesus' words, sorted by frequency, with common words like "the" removed. I did not have such a list at hand, but I took it as a challenge.
Thanks to software, most of the work to create a sorted listed of Jesus' vocabulary is trivial. I can easily make a frequency list of his words and remove common stopwords. The most challenging part for me was finding a source of the gospels from which it was easy to extract just Jesus' words. I asked around, and found that the World English Bible XML contains a <wj> (i.e. "words of Jesus") tag which delimits exactly what I need. So after a bit of processing, and thanks to NLTK, I was able to provide a basic list of Jesus' most common words:
- one - 221
- father - 211
- tell - 210
- man - 196
- God - 163
- things - 163
- come - 158
- son - 149
- go - 123
- also - 113
- know - 111
- may - 111
- kingdom - 104
- see - 102
- lord - 97
- said - 96
- therefore - 94
- give - 93
- heaven - 86
Based on the top of the list, I'd say Jesus was primarily talking about the good news.
I've shared the code.