Hit Counter
A man with a prong on his nose
The Spoonbill Generator

Olden Treasury

(1996–2007)

Golden Treasury

(in preparation)

Related Works

Other Projects

Contact the Spoonmaster

The Spoonbill Generator presents

The N+7 Machine

The N+7 procedure, invented in 1961 by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. (In French, it is referred to as the 'S+7' procedure.)

On this page you can enter an English text and 15 alternative texts will be generated, from N+1, which replaces each noun with the next one in the dictionary, to N+15, which takes the 15th noun following. The sample page of proverbs will quickly give you an idea of the effect.

You can type in your own text or copy and paste from another source. (Project Gutenberg is a good source of well-known texts). Or you can look at some of the examples below.

There's probably a limit to how large a text you can paste in, but in any case a few paragraphs will probably provide sufficient entertainment.

Enter a text

You can type in a text, or paste from another source

Dictionary:
Small (c. 2,000 nouns)
Medium (c. 3,000 nouns)
Large (c. 5,000 nouns)
Massive (c. 10,000 nouns)
Complete (> 30,000 nouns)

Examples

With thanks to Roland Clare and David Briggs.

Notes

  1. The N+7 Machine is not very clever — although it has some basic rules about plurals, there are quite a few plurals it cannot identify. It works by basic word substitution — it has no syntactical or other grammatical knowledge.
  2. The dictionaries used for this procedure are all based on the list of common nouns in the British National Corpus (BNC). The selection of words is based strictly on frequency, with the Small Dictionary holding only the 2,000 commonest nouns, while the Complete Dictionary includes all the "proper" words in the corpus (that is, it excludes things like acronyms and abbreviations, which are identified as nouns in the BNC).
  3. Many English words function both as nouns and verbs (e.g. rise, abandon), and this is particularly an issue with present participles such as swimming. Without any syntactical knowledge, the N+7 Machine assumes these are all nouns, so the resulting texts may not be syntactically correct, and this becomes more marked, the larger the dictionary. You can prevent a word being treated as a noun by prefixing it with =.
  4. Obviously, the smaller the dictionary, the more nouns in the text it will fail to spot as such. The advantage, though, is that it will also less often introduce inappropriate substitutions for other parts of speech than the larger dictionaries. Also, the smaller dictionaries will tend to offer new nouns that are semantically unrelated to the nouns in the original. The reasons for this is that a smaller dictionary will contain fewer compounds for core vocabulary like eye and sun. (The Complete Dictionary has 18 compounds with eye, for example, so eye will always be replaced by a closely related word.).
  5. The dictionaries are not circular. This means that the words that come right near the end of a dictionary will sometimes just be replaced repeatedly by the very last word (zone, zoo, zoom, or zygospore).
  6. Since the dictionaries use British English spelling, US forms like "color" and "favor" will not be recognized as nouns.
  7. Because the BNC draws on a wide range of genres, don't be surprised if a noun is replaced by one from a remote subject area.
  8. The site doesn't keep any record of the submitted or generated texts. If you find a text that gives particularly good results, please feel free to mail me at spoonmaster@spoonbill.org.
  9. More on the N+7 procedure will be found in the Oulipo Compendium, and the other items listed below.

About the N+7 / S+7 Method

This page was last revised February 09 2025.