Top Words and Phrases used in Princeton Senior Thesis Titles

Below are the most popular words and phrases in the titles of Princeton senior theses from 1926 to 2004, grouped by decade.

Phrases are ordered by frequency of occurrence. A phrase that was not in the preceding decade appears in green, a phrase that does not survive to the following decade is struck out. The number in parentheses following each phrase is the number of times it appeared in that decade. Clicking a phrase will search the catalog for those words (albeit without restricting to the decade in question).

Minutae: All phrases that appeared in both singular and plural (defined naively to mean that the last character was an "s") forms, were converted to singular form ("United States" was special-cased to stay plural). All punctuation was converted to spaces. All uppercase letters were converted to lowercase. Any word of less than three letters, along with the words (and, from, the, with, for), were eliminated prior to the ranking. Titles were downloaded from the thesis catalog on 19 Apr 2005. The links only search for the first three words in the phrase; for the four-word phrases, the fourth word will be dropped from the search (the search form only permits one to enter up to three words). No words or phrases that appeared in fewer than five titles over the course of the decade appears in these lists.

Contact: Joseph Barillari '04 (joseph@barillari.org / barillari.org)

Thanks to Mudd Library, to the Python programming language, and to the authors of 53820 senior theses.

Four-word phrases

Three-word phrases

Two-word phrases

Single words