Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software program designed by James W. Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis. LIWC calculates the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts, including emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech. With a click of a button, you can determine the degree any text uses positive or negative emotions, self-references, causal words, and 70 other language dimensions. The LIWC program can analyze hundreds of standard ASCII text files or Microsoft Word documents in seconds. The LIWC2007 program also allows you to build your own dictionaries to analyze dimensions of language specifically relevant to your interests. The Macintosh version of LIWC2007 has a feature that will highlight in color all the words found in a particular file when it is analyzed. With the Macintosh version, users can also create dictionaries that include literal phrases (e.g. 'you know') as well as individual words and word stems.