The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past two years:
- Untitled
- Aubade
- Gravity
- Prayer
- Homecoming
- Night
- Drowning
- Home
- Sonnet
- Sleep
The laws of probability dictate that repeat single-world titles are far more common than multi-word titles, which is why these are all single words. Since we receive more poems than any other genre, and since poems are more likely to have single-word titles than other genres, almost all of these are poems. These don’t represent a huge percentage of our submissions (we received seventeen works entitled “Untitled,” for instance), but they do stand out for their frequency.
Oddly, there’s no overlap with the top ten from the last time we did this.
21 Comments
I would like to see the most common fiction titlesI can do that. Here are the ten most common fiction titles that we’ve received since 2006: * Reunion * Homecoming * Home * Gravity * You * Waiting * Coming Home * Blind Date * Evolution * Flight We’re looking at pretty low numbers here—”Reunion” is used just six times, “Flight” just three. But these results are pretty interesting. Five of these titles are about people coming together. Three mention “home.” There’s definitely a strong theme here.
SELECT title, COUNT(*) AS number FROM submissions GROUP BY title WHERE status != "withdrawn" ORDER BY number DESC LIMIT 10
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