GreaseThe Grease for Windows software is no longer being sold, developed or supported, but was slightly tidied up in early 2018. You may download it at no cost. The only available documentation is that contained in the ample Help information.
- Free download: Grease for Windows in Zip file. Installation consists simply of unzipping the contents of Grease.zip into a Windows folder of your choice (e.g. C:\Program Files\Grease) and running and/or creating a Windows short cut to Grease.exe.
Grease for Windows is a vocabulary analysis program. In simpler words, it sorts through any document or set of documents saved in plain text format – or a single document copied from your word processor to the Windows clipboard – and prepares a table of all the words used and the number of times each was used.
The table can be displayed in alphabetical order, in word frequency order (calling attention to the words you most use) or in word length order (calling particular attention to your usage of long words). There are various further display options, including choice of upper or lower case, whether numbers should be displayed, and more. The table can also be saved to a text file on disk, using the same optional settings as the current screen display.
Most typically and most usefully, Grease operates in conjunction with a list of very common and uninteresting words, provided in the accompanying file Grease.dat (which can be inspected or edited as you please from within Grease). Unless you specifically ask to see them, the common words are ignored during compilation of the results table. Once all these nuts and bolts like "the" and "and" have been screened out by the program, the word-frequency list highlights the less common words which you happen to have used most in your document(s). The resulting insights can sometimes be alarming.
The program's name was inspired by David Lodge's comic novel Small World (1984), in which a novelist's complete works are analysed in this way by fanatical researchers, and he is paralysed by the information that the significant word he most often uses is ... "grease". A traumatic discovery.