Preface 1. Introductory, personal and apologetic 2. The word-distribution: illustrations 3. Theory of the word-distribution, with an exordium on sampling: the characteristic 4. The characteristic of K: practical problems 5. Certain difficulties and sources of fallacy 6. Word-distributions from the different works of the same author 7. The distribution of the vocabulary over samples from several works of the same author: vocabulary ratios of Bunyan and Macaulay 8. The alphabetical distribution of English vocabulary: etymological analysis of the Bunyan and Macaulay data 9. The De imitatione Christi, Thomas à Kempis and Gerson 10. The De imitatione Christi, Thomas à Kempis and Gerson, continued 11. Valedictory Table of characteristics for nouns and chart Appendices. Nouns in the samples grouped according to the numbers of occurrences Index.

George Udny Yule (1871–1951) was a British statistician who was influential in the development of modern statistics. Originally published in 1944, this book was formed from Yule's interest in the controversy surrounding the authorship of De Imitatione Christi, a text generally attributed to Thomas à Kempis. The text presents a statistical analysis of the vocabulary used in De Imitatione Christi, comparing it to different works written by Thomas and works by other authors. In so doing, it moves into the broader territory of purely statistical questions regarding frequency distributions and sample sizes. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in statistics and its relationship with literature.