they wrote down all the numbers in order, searched for repetitions, thought about it some more, and found a foothold. A Harvard professor had recently counted the words in a long English text, and the prairie codebreakers read his study. Of 100,000 total words, only 10,161 were unique, and just 10 words accounted for 26,677 of the 100,000: “the,” “of,” “and,” “to,” “a,” “in,” “that,” “it,” “is,” “I.” “You can’t convey much intelligence using only these words,” William wrote, “and yet you can’t construct a long, intelligible, unambiguous message without using them over and over again.” Turning
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