Shakespeare was a Levidromist

Posted on
Levidromist Shakespeare

We crunched the data - the Complete Works of William Shakespeare - and came up with a startling conclusion - William Shakespeare was a levidromist!

Everyone has heard of William Shakespeare. A poet, playwright and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He is also regarded as the world's greatest dramatist.

And now for us to introduce some drama. He was also a levidromist.

Back in late 2018, we introduced a tool to our website called "levidrome finder". This tool allows the reader to enter in some text (up to 100000 characters at a time) and it will find all the levidromes and any matching levidromic pairs. Using the tool at the backend (with no restrictions imposed), we ran it against the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's works consists of 39 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 narrative poems. They can be viewed at http://shakespeare.mit.edu/. We captured all this "data" and ran our tool against it.

Here is the summary of the results:

  1. There are 195 individual pieces of work in the Complete Works of Shakespeare
  2. There are 221567 lines of text
  3. There are 5834856 individual characters (including punctuation)
  4. There are 931523 words
  5. There are 110180 levidromes (from our english list)
  6. There are 265208 levidromes (from our english-insane list)

From the english-insane list results, there are 265208 levidromes. Doing the math, 265208 / 931523 = 28.5 %. From the english list results...that is 110180 / 931523 = 11.8 %

Now depending on which results your prefer, Shakespeare's works are made up of either 11.8% or 28.5% levidromes. Either way, that is a lot of levidromes.

And naturally his works also produced levidromic pairs. We have included links to the results:

  1. shakespeare-english.txt
  2. shakespeare-english-insane.txt

Based on those figures, we can clearly say Shakespeare was a levidromist since better than 1 out of every 4 words is a levidrome. Way to go Shakespeare! Or should I call you William. Heck, we are friends now....Bill.

This is no surprise to us (I know, I used the word "startling" before but that was to add to the drama). After all, we are all levidromists. We wrote an article and did a snapshot from the New York Times on the day the article was written. And sure enough, 20% of that snapshot was made up of levidromes. They are everywhere.

If Shakespeare was a levidromist, then surely the dictionaries should get on board as well.

Spread the word. Even share the article. As always, #Levidrome