Here is a list of the ten most frequent four-word phrases in the King James Bible:
| the children of israel | 633 |
| it came to pass | 453 |
| thus saith the lord | 415 |
| and it came to | 396 |
| of the children of | 374 |
| the lord thy god | 303 |
| the house of the | 279 |
| the word of the | 266 |
| word of the lord | 257 |
| saith the lord god | 257 |
This is the sort of thing that would have taken years of scholarship even forty years ago, and yet I created this in less than one minute on a notebook PC (Clarification added 06 February 2002: It took less than a minute to run. It took somewhat longer to write the script. But not years longer.) I used a home-baked Perl script to do this. Perl can stand for “Practical Extraction and Report Language”; see why?
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The software I’ve just found allows to calculate frequencies for words or phrases of any length. Just for those who don’t want to study Perl
http://www.cro-code.com/textanz.jsp