Moby Part of Speech List

What this book is like

This is not a novel about a whale. It is a computational experiment: a list of every word in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, tagged by its part of speech—noun, verb, adjective, and so on—compiled by Grady Ward. Reading it straight through feels like scanning a vast, dry inventory of language itself, stripped of plot, character, or sea spray. The tone is purely categorical; the setting is the English sentence, taken apart word by word.

This will appeal to word nerds, linguists, programmers, and anyone curious about how a classic text is built from raw grammatical parts. Listening to it is a peculiar experience: expect a rhythmic, almost hypnotic recitation of isolated words and tags, with no narrative thread to follow. It works best as background texture or a reference to dip into, not as a story to absorb. If you like data made audible, this is your oddity.