: Re: Why are one-word titles so dominant in books, film, and games? Something I talk about with friends when planning and sharing our projects & media we like is titles - and specifically my

@Michele605

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The following is a VERY naive piece of research.

I've downloaded the IMDB titles dataset (available here: datasets.imdbws.com/title.basics.tsv.gz), and took the 3rd column - primaryTitle. I then created a histogram of the number of titles containing each count of words.

One very probable problem is I'm not taking language into consideration; another is that 'a word' is anything between spaces (so anglo-american counts as one word, as does the french word L'équilibriste; in both cases I'd be happier counting them as two words, but my time was very short)

The histogram seems to indicate the dominance you mention isn't necessarily there. In contrast, there seem to be a surprising number of titles with 5 words in them.

Focusing on Movies only (titleType==movie) changes the results significantly (removing the '5 words' effect; significantly lowering the 2 words. Apparently a lot of TV episodes are titled 'Episode Aired DD MMM YYYY' making them 5 words in total). Still - I'm not sure I see dominance of single-word titles.

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