Colour in children’s novels

Following up on the children’s literature theme again, here is an analysis of colour words in three quite different books:

• The classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)
• The equally famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1870)
• The rather formulaic Five Go Adventuring Again by Enid Blyton (1943)

About 0.57% of the words in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (after excluding stop words) are colour words, with a wide variety being used (“the finback whale, yellowish brown, the swiftest of all cetaceans” and “Portuguese men-of-war that let their ultramarine tentacles drift in their wakes, medusas whose milky white or dainty pink parasols were festooned with azure tassels”):

In contrast, Five Go Adventuring Again only has about 0.25% colour words, mostly used in clichéd ways (“Anne went very red” and “her blue eyes glinting”). The one use of “scarlet” refers to “scarlet fever,” rather than to a colour:

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz mentions colour even more than the other two books, with about 1.21% colour words. Green and yellow are particularly common, given the storyline:

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