Fig. 1

The frequency of words related to natural or agentive deaths, in four types of documents. Error bars stand for 95% confidence intervals. The frequency of words related to natural death in diary entries (on the far right) is partially inflated, because diary entries, being shorter, have richer vocabularies relative to their length. The fact that our word list for words related to natural death contains more words (137) than the one for agentive death (81) does not explain away the difference between the two proportions. Even when controlling for this, words related to natural death are still much more frequent than words related to agentive death in all four types of documents