Six Word Wonder 2022 – by the numbers

We had over 3,300 entries for the Six Word Wonder 2022 writing contest. And that gives us a chance to look at a few statistics.

The beautiful word cloud is created by the fine people at WordClouds.Com. It’s a brilliant way to try to visualise all the stories and memoirs that were entered on a single page.

Fun Facts about the Six Word Wonder entries

The total words entered into the contest was 19,800, which is roughly equivalent to 80 double-sided pages.

Read all those stories in one go it would as prose would take approximately 70 minutes, which doesn’t seem that much considering the effort.

The most common word used across all the six word stories was “LOVE”. This was clearly a hot running theme. More on common words later.

On average, there were 4.78 letters per word and on average 5.10 words per sentence. Remember, six word stories and memoirs have to be six words long, but that isn’t all one sentence.

There were 5203 unique words used overall. Thanks to countwordsworth.com for these insights.

We had entries from 57 countries. The most common competitor countries entered from, in order of entries, the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Canada, Philippines, France, Netherlands, South Africa.

The top 10 most common first names for entrant, in order, were Julie, Emily, Jennifer, Thomas, Daniel, Emma, Heather, John, Paul, and Sam.

Word Frequency is these six word memoirs

The most common word used across all the six word stories, excluding “Stop Words” like “and” or “is” was “LOVE”. In fact, LOVE was used 146 times across the entries. It was almost twice as popular as the next most common word – “ONE”

The other words in the top 10 were LIFE, NEVER, NOW, LIKE, DIED, EYES, DEATH, TIME

These words speak to be of contrast between togetherness and separation. And perhaps that’s the running theme of these six word stories and perhaps the human condition – where there is love and like, there’s also never and died.

The Top 100 words used in the contest

Here’s all of the 100 most commonly used words, excluding stop words like “the”. I suppose you can take this in two ways – either you can use this list as writing prompt for inspiration. OR you could use this list of words that might be cliches so use with caution!

All of the above excluded stop words. The most 10 common stop words, in order of frequency were:

It’s good to see that she and he were fairly equal in the rankings.

Want to be a statistic in the next contest?

Of course, six word memoirs and stories aren’t really about the numbers – they are about poetry and art.

Why not enter the Six Word Wonder contest this year – and you could be number one!

And if you’d like to read all the shortlisted entries, you’ll have to get yourself a copy of the Six Word Stories book.