I’m making lists of unfamiliar words as I read George Simenon’s Pietr-le-Letton. Below is my list for Chapter 5 (Le Russe Ivre), with links to the search result page on Linguee and word frequencies from the Google NGram Viewer.
The chapter takes place in a run-down bar in a fishing town (Fécamp) in winter, which accounts for why there are so many words about boats, bars, and rain. There’s 26 words here and the chapter is 9 pages long, so that’s about 3 new words a page – a “just right book” for my reading level.
| expression (root) | frequency |
|---|---|
| prunelles | 1 in 742,000 |
| bouges | 1 in 61,200 |
| soutiers | 1 in 11,100,000 |
| zinc | 1 in 396,000 |
| canaille | 1 in 690,000 |
| entrebâillement | 1 in 4,290,000 |
| crapuleux | 1 in 1,690,000 |
| louvoyer | 1 in 1,640,000 |
| luisant | 1 in 670 |
| oeillade | 1 in 13,900,000 |
| se saouler | 1 in 5,040,000 |
| vergue | 1 in 1,610,000 |
| tressaillir | 1 in 454,000 |
| heurter | 1 in 48,400 |
| toussotement | 1 in 11,600,000 |
| buée | 1 in 1,670,000 |
| ricaner | 1 in 528,000 |
| bac | 1 in 82,000 |
| tremper | 1 in 140,000 |
| tiraillait | 1 in 594,000 |
| bec-de-cane | 1 in 19,800,000 |
| tournant | 1 in 8,540 |
| marchand de bestiaux | 1 in 17,500,000 |
| entrouverte | 1 in 382,000 |
| blême | 1 in 860,000 |
| tasser | 1 in 166,000 |
The frequency numbers are from the French Google Books corpus, specifically books published in 2007. They count how many words of such books you would have to read on average before coming upon the given word in any of its inflected forms. As you can see, a lot of these are fairly literary or old-fashioned words – the Pietr-le-Letton was written in 1931, after all. There’s a few glitches in this analysis. The word luisant, from luire = to shine, is not so common you’d see it once in 670 words. Rather, Google NGram Viewer thinks that lui is a form of luire. As far as I can tell, that’s outright wrong, but of course the pronoun lui is very common and so the conflation makes the estimate worthless. The single form luisant occurs 1 in 1,160,000, but that doesn’t account for all the other forms of luire. So take the frequency estimates with a grain of salt
I’ll be curious to see if my list length diminishes in later chapters and later novels. I’m reminded of the game I used to play when reading Sherlock Holmes stories aloud with my daughter – we’d joke about how many paragraphs into a story Conan Doyle could get without using the word “singular”. It was rarely double-digit.