Hal - Deliberately Basic

About ten years ago I was looking for a program that would analyze a text document, and do a statistical analysis far beyond the simplicity of word processors. At that time I was writing technical documentation, and designing and building computer programs. With the exception of a couple of highly sophisticated software applications, built for highly sophisticated computer systems, and far beyond my reach, I could find nothing. So I built one.

I called it Wurdz. Wurdz did pretty much what I wanted it to do. It will look at every word in a document and return information such as, word count, character count, unique words, percentage of unique words in the document, and a facility to find a particular word in a long document. The output from Wurdz can be saved and imported into a spreadsheet application such as Excel® for extreme analysis.

For about a year I sold Wurdz, and although I never made a lot of money from these sales, I was amazed at how many people were willing to pay $10.00 (I think that was correct) for it. Like most people who use a computer, I used a lot of free software, and still do. I decided it was time to give something back, so I began to give Wurdz to anyone who wanted it, for no cost.

As my IT business model changed, so did my web sites. Wurdz followed that site change, and has been listed on several sites over the years. It is still listed in certain writers sites, with now defunct links to it. But the most amazing thing about this whole story is, Wurdz will not die a natural death. Somehow, people trace it down, and I get mail asking about Wurdz.

Wurdz has a few bugs. I discontinued development of Wurdz years ago, and there will never be any further development. Wurdz has no spyware, and as far as I can tell, will not harm your computer. If you decide to you use Wurdz, you do so at your own risk. I accept no responsibility for any loss of data, or any other malfunction of your computer system.

Here is an excerpt from a site where I once sold Wurdz.

This program is primarily directed toward writers or those interested in dissecting and analyzing text documents. But even if you only write letters or similar small documents, you may find it helpful to look at the way you’re putting sentences together, or word frequency in your text. Besides that, it’s fun to analyze books that someone else has written. For example, a classic novel. You can ascertain the vocabulary, at least in the current document, of an author by seeing the percentage of unique words used.

One of the more fun things to do is compare contrasting words in a document. How many times did you use me as compared to you, or love and hate? After you compare a number of words, you begin to see patterns emerge that go beyond mere words. If you’re writing an essay about your parents, how many times did you use male gender words compared to the female gender words?

Wurdz will run on Windows 95 through Windows XP. I have no idea if it will run on Windows Vista, so don’t ask. My primary system(s) are Mac OS X or Linux.

Want a copy of Wurdz? Download it HERE. To repeat, use this program at your own risk. Do not ask for help; there is no support. It is what it is, and will not be further developed.

As back in the days of giving Wurdz away free, I am interested to know who is using this program. I ask that you send me a message from the CONTACT page and let me know if you think it is worth turning over to someone else to be fully developed, and brought up to date.

Hal

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