I entered part of my novel into a word-frequency program
The most common words were not surprise (the, to, and, but, a, etc.), but was DID surprise me was the shere number of unique words I used. Out of the 65,000 words I entered, there were 8,000 unique ones. 8,000! Compare that to Pride and Prejudice with 121,000 words and 6,800 unique ones, or Wuthering Heights, with 116,000 words and about 9500 unique ones. I come right in between the two. *g* (Of course, about a hundred are actually typos, but still…)
I like words….

