Quiroga, counted
The Spanish room's ledger: the eight tales of «Cuentos de la selva» by Horacio Quiroga, counted exactly as they are served in the reading room. Nothing on this page is estimated or typed in by hand; every figure is computed from the room's own data files when the page is asked for, and the same table is a file.
The shelf, whole
17,546 running words across 1,298 sentences, containing 1,516 distinct lemmas — of which 39.2% occur exactly once across the whole shelf.
715 of those 1,516 lemmas (47%) appear in more than one tale. That is the figure that makes this a shelf rather than eight separate books: the vocabulary you buy reading the first one is spent again on the second.
The tales, one by one
Own lemmas to 95 is how many of a tale's own dictionary words, commonest first, cover 95% of its running text — the share of its vocabulary a reader must hold before the reading is close work rather than decoding. The room has no cross-shelf ladder, so no such column is printed here; where a number does not exist, it is not invented.
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences | Lemmas | Appear once | Own lemmas to 95 | Words per sentence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Las medias de los flamencos free | The Flamingos’ Stockings | 1,401 | 101 | 330 | 52% | 260 | 13.9 |
| La tortuga gigante first scene free | The Giant Tortoise | 1,710 | 99 | 387 | 49% | 302 | 17.3 |
| La gama ciega | The Blind Doe | 1,870 | 132 | 452 | 54% | 359 | 14.2 |
| El loro pelado | The Plucked Parrot | 1,882 | 149 | 419 | 53% | 325 | 12.6 |
| La abeja haragana | The Lazy Bee | 2,032 | 177 | 470 | 54% | 369 | 11.5 |
| Historia de dos cachorros de coatí y de dos cachorros de hombre | The Story of Two Coati Cubs and Two Human Children | 2,286 | 141 | 503 | 50% | 389 | 16.2 |
| La guerra de los yacarés | The War of the Caimans | 3,017 | 254 | 504 | 44% | 354 | 11.9 |
| El paso del Yabebirí | The Ford of the Yabebirí | 3,348 | 245 | 547 | 47% | 380 | 13.7 |
The same rows, said in sentences
«Las medias de los flamencos» carries 1,401 words in 101 sentences; 260 of its 330 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La tortuga gigante» carries 1,710 words in 99 sentences; 302 of its 387 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La gama ciega» carries 1,870 words in 132 sentences; 359 of its 452 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«El loro pelado» carries 1,882 words in 149 sentences; 325 of its 419 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La abeja haragana» carries 2,032 words in 177 sentences; 369 of its 470 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«Historia de dos cachorros de coatí y de dos cachorros de hombre» carries 2,286 words in 141 sentences; 389 of its 503 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«La guerra de los yacarés» carries 3,017 words in 254 sentences; 354 of its 504 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
«El paso del Yabebirí» carries 3,348 words in 245 sentences; 380 of its 547 lemmas read it at 95 in a hundred.
What 1918 spelled differently
The first edition is very nearly modern Spanish, and this is the whole of the difference the room has to carry: the written accent the Real Academia only dropped in 1959, on monosyllabic preterites, and the old accented preposition. Every one of these is printed with today's spelling beside it in the room, so a reader is never stopped by a word they already know.
| As printed, 1918 | As spelled today |
|---|---|
| Dió | Dio |
| Fué | Fue |
| Vió | Vio |
| dió | dio |
| fué | fue |
| fuí | fui |
| vió | vio |
| á | a |
| áún | aún |
The file
quiroga-counted.csv — one row per tale, the columns above, openable in any spreadsheet.
Method
Mined, never made. The tales are public-domain texts, entire and in the Spanish they were printed in — no invented sentences, no simplified retellings, and if a retold edition ever joins the shelf it will be labelled as one and excluded from every row of this page and its file. Words are counted with the same tokenizer the room's gloss apparatus uses, and mapped to dictionary forms through the room's own form-to-lemma table, so these figures and the ones on each tale's own page are the same arithmetic.
The other two rooms keep their own ledgers: Russian classics, counted, which carries the fuller coverage ladder, and Grimm, counted.