Lexical dataset of Charles Darwin's scientific works (1859–1881)

This dataset contains a lexical table derived from the scientific works of Charles Darwin published between 1859 and 1881. We adopted a computational corpus linguistics methodology to perform a comparative lexical analysis. The table contains the excerpts of Darwin’s work that includes “natural selection”, “use and disuse”, “conditions of life”, “reversion”, “correlation of growth”, and “sexual selection”. The corpus was built from 13 volumes corresponding to 11 scientific titles authored by Charles Darwin. All texts were obtained in plain-text format from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (Wyhe, 2002). The dataset includes: (i) a table containing the processed lexical data extracted from each work, and (ii) a frequency table summarizing the occurrence of the selected terms across volumes and publication periods. We performed a close reading of the texts and manually removed advertisement. The dataset consists exclusively of processed lexical data and does not reproduce the original texts in full. All source works are in the public domain.