Mendenhall Counts Word Lengths and Authorship Becomes a Statistic

Stylometry analyses an author's measurable writing style, word choice and sentence patterns, usually by computational or statistical method, establishing whether a disputed text was likely written by its claimed author based on numerical comparison with that author's known works rather than on literary impression alone. The American physicist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall published The Characteristic Curves of Composition in 1887, proposing that the distribution of word lengths an author habitually used formed a measurable, largely unconscious signature, and demonstrating the method by plotting and comparing these curves across different writers, the founding statement of quantitative authorship analysis.

A scripture or sacred text attributed to a single named author, a set of epistles claimed as one apostle's work, a scriptural book traditionally credited to one prophet, is exactly the kind of claim stylometry's numerical method can test, comparing the measurable stylistic signature of one section against another rather than relying on traditional attribution or later editorial claims. The atlas relies on stylometry wherever a scripture's traditional single authorship is disputed, reporting what the statistical evidence across a text's own internal style actually supports.