A couple of days ago, I asked my Twitter followers which they thought were the top 5 words used in YA titles. Queen, fire, star, shadow and daughter came up several times. With popular books like Shadow and Bone, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, The Star-Touched Queen, Daughter of the Pirate King, and The Girl from Everywhere, I’m not surprised at the responses. But were they right? I’ve got answers with the top 20 words in YA book titles.
My Method
Parameters
In order to determine which terms most appear in YA book titles, I decided to analyse novels released over the past two years (November 2015 to October 2017). That’s how long I’ve been keeping record of new releases from the USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
My focus was on books released through publishing houses. I didn’t include self-published books because many are only available as ebooks, so they don’t go through the same marketing channels as physical books sold in bookstores. Neither do I have the time and capacity to pull together a representative list of self-published young adult books. That’s also why I excluded books from vanity presses.
Altogether I analysed nearly 2,000 book titles, excluding secondary or subtitles. I can’t guarantee that it’s an exhaustive list because I may have missed out a few releases from smaller presses that I’m not familiar with. Given the volume of book titles, though, I don’t expect missing titles to significantly impact the rankings of the top 20 words in YA book titles.
Ranking Criteria
When ranking the top words used, I omitted articles. “The” would naturally have topped the list. 446 YA book titles started with “The”, so no contest there. Hah. I also didn’t factor conjunctions. “And” would otherwise have taken second place with 102 appearances.
My concern was with root words. This means I counted both singular and plural as well as compound words. Varying meanings also didn’t impact these rankings. For example, “heart”, “hearts”, “heartened” and “heartbreak” all counted towards the frequency of “heart” in YA book titles. For terms of equal frequency, words with fewer compounds ranked higher. I treated synonyms as distinct words.
Now that the details are out of the way, here’s the list:
Top 20 Words in YA Book Titles
- Girl
Frequency: 74 - You
Frequency: 65 - Dark
Frequency: 40
Compound(s): Darkness (10) - Love
Frequency: 31 - Life
Frequency: 31
Compound(s): Afterlife, Lifeboat, Otherlife - Star
Frequency: 31
Compound(s): Starless, Starling, Starfall, Starflight - Night
Frequency: 29
Compound(s): Midnight (14), Yesternight - I
Frequency: 27 - To be
Frequency: 27
Note(s): Is (22), Am (3), Be (2) - Heart
Frequency: 27
Compound(s): Heartbreak, Heartless, Blackhearts - Lie
Frequency: 25 - Me
Frequency: 24 - Fall
Frequency: 24
Compound(s): Dreamfall, Starfall - Break
Frequency: 24
Compound(s): Broken (12), Breakaway, Heartbreak, Breakfast - Shadow
Frequency: 24
Compound(s): Shadowblack, Shadowcaster, Shadowhouse, Shadowhunter - World
Frequency: 23
Compound(s): Hellworld - Last
Frequency: 21 - We
Frequency: 21 - Other
Frequency: 21
Compound(s): Otherlife - End
Frequency: 21
Compound(s): Endless, Endgame
Top 20 Nouns in YA Book Titles
If you’re trying to come up with a YA book title, the top 20 nouns might be interesting too. You know, depending on whether you want your book to be unique, or you want it to be instantly recognisable as a YA book.
In order, the top 20 nouns are: girl (74), star (31), life (31), love (31), night (29), heart (27), shadow (24), world (23), end (21), fire (21), summer (20), lie (20), boy (20), day (19), light (19), dream (18), queen (17), secret (17), truth (15), king (15)
This research is so interesting! Of all the words I think ‘life’ is the one that surprises me the most because I can’t think of many titles that feature it. I admit I did expect to see daughter and queen in that top 20. Maybe it’s because a few books with those in the title have happened to be very popular/successful, making it seem more common if another book also uses those words.
Thank you for compiling all of this information!
This is such a great post! Such a neat idea…It’s so interesting to see the frequency of the words that show up in titles.
Wow, this is such an interesting post! Some of the results were unsurprising (Girl, for example, always seems to be popular in book titles!), but words like ‘break’ surprised me. I didn’t realise that one cropped up that often!
Can I just say that I love this idea for a blog post! It can be so difficult to come up with new and interesting book blogging topics but this is a great one!
Also, I was expecting the frequency for “Queen” to be much higher.. Literally, it feels like it’s everywhere :P
Ooooh! This is a great post! There were some on that list I didn’t expect! I’m really impressed with all the effort and research you must have put in to find it all out! I love this idea!
This was so interesting to read! I wonder if YA is mostly a “female” genre since ‘girl’ is the most common word in book titles?
I’m just here, casually applauding you and this wonderful blog post
Thank you for compiling this list, it’s so interesting! I admit lately YA book titles seem familiar one to another, but I didn’t expect them to have so many similar words. Star, bone, smoke, and girl are definitely some words I’ve heard A LOT in YA books :)
This is SO interesting! I’m not super surprised by a lot of the words on the lists, although I am surprised that queen wasn’t on the overall list (not surprised it made it onto the list of nouns!). It seems like every book has queen in its title, haha.