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The nonsensical forms in his books "create a rhythmic feel and sound," and this can create a unique experience for a young reader. 1 Nonsense Word Fluency (NFW) is thought to be a key becoming a proficient reader. 2 Alphabetic principals allow children to link sounds and words. Kids who are better at picking up nonsense words will be better readers.
As the text was marked up, some words looked like nonsense were actual words. To avoid miscoding words, all text coded for nonsense was searched for via a dictionary or Googled. If the word was unique to Seuss, it was tagged as nonsense.
Names that are typical were not tagged as nonsense, but those sounding made-up were. The names needed to be unique to the corpus of Dr. Seuss.
Our corpus consists of 24 works by Theodor Seuss Geisel, commonly known as Dr. Seuss. The texts were found online to minimize transcription. The text files were reviewed for accuracy against the actual books, PDFs or ePub files. His children’s books spanned the time period from 1931 to 1990.
The works selected represent 44% of his entire corpus of 54 works. For collections or stories, such as The Sneetches and Other Stories, were broken up into individual works. A list of our corpus is below:
| Title | Year |
|---|---|
| And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street | 1937 |
| The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins | 1938 |
| Horton Hatches the Egg | 1940 |
| Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose | 1948 |
| Bartholomew and the Oobleck | 1949 |
| Horton Hears a Who! | 1954 |
| On Beyond Zebra! | 1955 |
| How the Grinch Stole Christmas! | 1957 |
| The Cat in the Hat | 1957 |
| The Cat in the Hat Comes Back | 1958 |
| Yertle the Turtle | 1958 |
| One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish | 1960 |
| Green Eggs and Ham | 1960 |
| Too Many Daves | 1961 |
| What Was I Scared Of? | 1961 |
| Dr. Seuss's ABC | 1963 |
| Hop on Pop | 1963 |
| Fox in Socks | 1965 |
| Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? | 1970 |
| The Lorax | 1971 |
| Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! | 1972 |
| There's a Wocket in My Pocket! | 1974 |
| The Butter Battle Book | 1984 |
| Oh, the Places You'll Go! | 1990 |
We have set up our schema for nonsense words to record the part of speech and function.
Click on the parts of speech or function to see examples.
Parts of speech can be:
Function may include:
We further marked up the morphemes in each nonsense word, hoping to identify the English morphemes Dr. Seuss uses. After extracting a list of all of the distinct nonsense words using XQuery, we marked each morpheme for its type, part, and whether or not it was English.
Types of morphemes:
Free Lexical: can stand on its own as a word (e.g. bang, once,
see)
Free Functional: a closed class of morphemes (new ones cannot be
added) including mostly function words (e.g. the, in, some)
Bound Derivational: cannot stand on its own as a word, changes
the part of speech of the word (e.g. ing, ly)
Bound Inflectional: cannot stand on its own as a word, modify a
verb’s tense or a noun’s number without changing the part of speech (e.g. ed, s,
‘s)
Parts: prefix, root, suffix