Language Families and Literary Genre
09-13-2026
Are all words as poetic as others? I’ve always thought words of Germanic origin had a certain poetic brevity, a mystique. Latinate words are too stuffy. Why say soil, when you can sod? Why say condensation, when you can say dew? Why say obscurity, when you can say murk?
I thought I’d test this concept. Do different genres use more words derived from particular language families? It turns out, they do. Using a Wiktionary-derived dataset I compiled, I analyzed every word[1] (about 61 million) across 3,226 public domain texts spanning adventure, horror, humor, mystery, poetry, romance, and scifi. Here’s the data:
| Word origin | Adventure | Horror | Humor | Mystery | Poetry | Romance | Scifi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germanic core | 50.8% | 49.6% | 47.5% | 49.1% | 56.9% | 50.7% | 49.6% |
| Norse & Germanic kin | 6.3% | 5.5% | 5.8% | 6.0% | 5.9% | 5.6% | 6.0% |
| French/Norman | 4.4% | 4.3% | 4.5% | 4.3% | 3.8% | 4.6% | 4.2% |
| Latin | 30.2% | 33.1% | 33.6% | 32.3% | 25.4% | 31.3% | 31.7% |
| Greek | 3.7% | 3.8% | 4.3% | 3.9% | 4.0% | 3.5% | 4.6% |
| Other Romance | 0.4% | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.2% | 0.4% | 0.3% |
| World/other | 4.2% | 3.4% | 4.0% | 4.0% | 3.8% | 3.9% | 3.6% |
Already, there are some noticeable differences. Though I figured the most common words may be biasing the data. I didn’t want to normalize for frequency – some of the texts are quite long – so I decided to strip the top 1000 most used English words from the dataset. Here’s the result:
| Word origin | Adventure | Horror | Humor | Mystery | Poetry | Romance | Scifi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germanic core | 37.6% | 35.4% | 33.4% | 34.5% | 47.5% | 36.4% | 36.4% |
| Norse & Germanic kin | 7.1% | 6.3% | 6.4% | 6.9% | 6.6% | 6.3% | 6.6% |
| French/Norman | 6.3% | 6.2% | 6.4% | 6.4% | 5.0% | 6.7% | 5.9% |
| Latin | 39.0% | 43.3% | 43.6% | 42.5% | 31.5% | 41.4% | 40.6% |
| Greek | 4.6% | 4.7% | 5.4% | 4.8% | 5.0% | 4.4% | 5.8% |
| Other Romance | 0.6% | 0.4% | 0.4% | 0.5% | 0.2% | 0.5% | 0.4% |
| World/other | 4.8% | 3.7% | 4.4% | 4.4% | 4.2% | 4.3% | 4.3% |
Now, the differences are more stark. As may be expected, poetry[2] – perhaps more accurately a meta-genre – is the most divergent. Poetry has 30% more words of Germanic origin than sci-fi, while sci-fi has 28% more words of Latinate origin than poetry. This confirms my suspicions. Latin terminology remains additionally scientific, extra analytic, undoubtedly progressive in aspect, composable and affixed, unambiguous. Germanic words, on the other hand, leave the door open to more meanings; they’re pithy, but sly, each a wiry riddle.
Even intuitively, we understand the shapes of words; these shapes – in some Sapir-Whorf-esque countenance – conform to their heritage. The Gauls are kikis, and their suave swords, and their sharp words. The Romans are boubas, and their round politics, and their refined bosses. And genres are shapes as well; as are the letters, and the many of our mouths. There are lots of shapes in language.