H.P. Lovecraft’s 10 Favorite Words and a Free Lovecraft eBook

Last December, I became frustrated when attempting to find an Nook-compatible eBook, free or otherwise, of the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft. Initially, I used a nearly-complete file from the Australian Project Gutenberg and turned it into a mildly useful but still incomplete and unstructured ebook. That wouldn’t do, so I did what any good librarian-in-training would—I took the time to create a proper complete works eBook and released it to the public.

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft is available in two eBook formats, EPUB (for the Nook and a few others) and MOBI (for the Kindle). It contains all the original stories which Lovecraft wrote as an adult, beginning in 1917 with “The Tomb” and ending in 1935 with his last original work “The Haunter of the Dark.” The table of contents at the end of this post has a complete list, including the years in which stories were written.

If you’re interested in learning more about the eBook, the creation process, the indispensable websites, and the files in your eBook download, you can read about it here.

Which Words did Lovecraft Use Most?

In the process of creating the eBook, I realized I had the opportunity to discover Lovecraft’s most-used words. If you’ve ever read him, a handful of words have probably jumped out at you again and again. Perhaps you considered whipping up a bingo card or a tally sheet. Some of the words I think of immediately when someone mentions Lovecraft’s vocabulary are “eldritch,” “squamous,” “cyclopean,” “indescribable,” “decadent,” “unnameable,” and “blasphemous.”

Oddly enough, “squamous” was only used once in an original work (“The Dunwich Horror”). I found it once in a collaboration, but it probably stuck with readers because Lovecraft is the sole author we’ve read who’s used it. The following are the ten words, or root words, which occur most often in Lovecraft’s original writings:

• Hideous – 260
• Faint (ed/ing) – 189
• Nameless – 157
• Antiqu (e/arian) – 128
• Singular (ly) – 115
• Madness – 115
• Abnormal – 94
• Blasphem (y/ous) – 92
• Accursed – 76
• Loath (ing/some) – 71

You can read more of the most-used words and word counts for places, tomes, and characters in my full post on Lovecraft’s favorite words.

Table of Contents

The eBook’s table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.

• The Tomb (1917)
• Dagon (1917)
• Polaris (1918)
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
• Memory (1919)
• Old Bugs (1919)
• The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)
• The White Ship (1919)
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)
• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)
• The Terrible Old Man (1920)
• The Tree (1920)
• The Cats of Ulthar (1920)
• The Temple (1920)
• Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)
• The Street (1920)
• Celephaïs (1920)
• From Beyond (1920)
• Nyarlathotep (1920)
• The Picture in the House (1920)
• Ex Oblivione (1921)
• The Nameless City (1921)
• The Quest of Iranon (1921)
• The Moon-Bog (1921)
• The Outsider (1921)
• The Other Gods (1921)
• The Music of Erich Zann (1921)
• Herbert West — Reanimator (1922)
• Hypnos (1922)
• What the Moon Brings (1922)
• Azathoth (1922)
• The Hound (1922)
• The Lurking Fear (1922)
• The Rats in the Walls (1923)
• The Unnamable (1923)
• The Festival (1923)
• The Shunned House (1924)
• The Horror at Red Hook (1925)
• He (1925)
• In the Vault (1925)
• The Descendant (1926)
• Cool Air (1926)
• The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
• Pickman’s Model (1926)
• The Silver Key (1926)
• The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
• The Colour Out of Space (1927)
• The Very Old Folk (1927)
• The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)
• The History of the Necronomicon (1927)
• Ibid (1928)
• The Dunwich Horror (1928)
• The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
• At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)
• The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
• The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
• The Evil Clergyman (1933)
• The Book (1933)
• The Shadow out of Time (1934)
• The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

RuthX is a mild-mannered librarian by day who serves the dread lord Cthulhu after dark and hopes to work in VERY Special Collections at Miskatonic University’s library, once she gets them to admit it exists.