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The Best of Sherlock Holmes |
(sorted by Number of Quotes)
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Story |
Number of Quotes |
Quotes per 10K Words |
Number of Listings |
Listings per 10K Words |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Sign of the Four | 6 | 1.4 | 29 | 7 |
| A Study in Scarlet | 5 | 1.1 | 16 | 4 |
| "A Scandal in Bohemia" | 4 | 4.7 | 19 | 22 |
| "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" | 3 | 3.1 | 11 | 11 |
| The Valley of Fear | 3 | 0.5 | 13 | 2 |
| "The Crooked Man" | 2 | 2.8 | 18 | 25 |
| "The Final Problem" | 2 | 2.8 | 8 | 11 |
| "A Case of Identity" | 2 | 2.8 | 6 | 9 |
| "The Noble Bachelor" | 2 | 2.5 | 2 | 2 |
| "The Missing Three-Quarter" | 2 | 2.5 | 2 | 2 |
| "The Red-Headed League" | 2 | 2.4 | 7 | 9 |
| "The Abbey Grange" | 2 | 2.2 | 9 | 10 |
| "The Norwood Builder" | 2 | 2.2 | 4 | 4 |
| "Silver Blaze" | 2 | 2.1 | 9 | 9 |
| "The Devil's Foot" | 2 | 2.0 | 5 | 5 |
| "Wisteria Lodge" | 2 | 1.7 | 6 | 5 |
| "The Sussex Vampire" | 1 | 1.7 | 5 | 8 |
| "The Dying Detective" | 1 | 1.7 | 1 | 2 |
| "His Last Bow" | 1 | 1.6 | 4 | 7 |
| "Charles Augustus Milverton" | 1 | 1.5 | 3 | 4 |
| "The Stockbrokers's Clerk" | 1 | 1.5 | 1 | 1 |
| "The Five Orange Pips" | 1 | 1.4 | 4 | 5 |
| "The Reigate Squires" | 1 | 1.4 | 2 | 3 |
| "The Greek Interpreter" | 1 | 1.4 | 2 | 3 |
| "The Solitary Cyclist" | 1 | 1.3 | 3 | 4 |
| "The Musgrave Ritual" | 1 | 1.3 | 2 | 3 |
| "The Disappearance of Lady..." | 1 | 1.3 | 1 | 1 |
| "The Blue Carbuncle" | 1 | 1.3 | 1 | 1 |
| "The Second Stain" | 1 | 1.0 | 8 | 8 |
| "The Copper Beeches" | 1 | 1.0 | 8 | 8 |
| "The Dancing Men" | 1 | 1.0 | 3 | 3 |
| "The Speckled Band" | 1 | 1.0 | 2 | 2 |
| "The Bruce-Partington Plans" | 1 | 0.9 | 3 | 3 |
| "The Naval Treaty" | 1 | 0.8 | 3 | 2 |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | 1 | 0.2 | 7 | 1 |
| TOTALS | 62 | nm | 227 | nm |
| AVERAGE | 1.8 | 1.7 | 6.5 | 5.9 |
Notes:
Table is based on citations in Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett or The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Canonical passages appear in the 11th (1937) to 16th (1992) editions of Bartlett and all four editions (1941-1992) of Oxford. The tallies above include items that appear in footnotes to quotations by other people.
Additional details are provided in the monograph "Quoting Sherlock Holmes: Some Observations on the Most Popular Passages" by Randall Stock.
Definitions:
Number of Quotes: number of quotations, where passages with similar or identical wording from different stories are considered different quotations.
Quotes per 10K Words: the number of quotations divided by the number of words in the story.
Number of Listings: the total number of appearances (listings) in editions of Bartlett or Oxford. Thus, a story with one quotation that's listed in 3 editions and another quotation that's listed in 2 editions would have 5 listings.
Listings per 10K Words: the number of listings divided by the number of words in the story.
Story lengths were based on "The Word Length of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Charles Lauterbach in The Baker Street Journal, April 1960, pp. 101-4.
Vers. 2.0ax-RN Original work
Copyright ©1999
Randall Stock. All Rights Reserved.