The Generic Doc Savage Title

If you are 15 years old, and really bored, you may decide to count the words used in Doc Savage titles. You may even post this on the web for other fans to see. Boy, are you twisted…

If you are 15 years old, and really bored, you may decide to count the words used in Doc Savage titles.

You may hide this from your mother who finds you a bit too obsessed with the books in the first place.

Years later, with the advent of inexpensive home computers you check your work. You decide that you were pretty close. Not bad for a bored 15 year-old.

What had you found? Well, the most used word is the. This isn’t a big suprise since most books started with the. How many? 119 with 13 serving their place in the middle of titles.

As a matter of fact, there are 599 total words in the Doc Savage titles (counting hyphenated words as 1 each, of course) and 37 words occur at least 3 times. Still with me? After “the” the (are you trying to say this out loud?) next most used word is of(26). That’s no surprise, but it’s followed by Death(13), Terror(12), and some form of Devil(11). The others used 5 or more times are: Man(9), Men(6), Black(6), in(6), Island or Isle(6), Fear(5), and Mystery(5).

I guess the generic Doc Savage title would be: “The Terror Death” or “Terror of the Death Devil”. Wait, I kinda like that last one. Wasn’t that the May ’36 issue?

Generic title

Originally published sometime in the late 90s.

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