Numlock News: May 11, 2026 • Red, Trains, Bears

May 11, 2026

By Olivia Walch

Walt is on vacation, today’s edition comes from Olivia Walch. She is the author of Sleep Groove: Why Your Body’s Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It, the coauthor of Political Geometry: Rethinking Redistricting in the US with Math, Law, and Everything In Between and the founder of Arcascope.

Happy Monday, everyone! It’s great to be back for another guest newsletter. In the past, I’ve done NUMLOCKs on themes related to books I helped edit (gerrymandering) or wrote (sleep). For this one I decided to flip the script and tell you all a little bit about the fine literature I’ve been reading these days.

Moo, Baa, La La La!

Among children’s books with a barn animal sound in the title, “moo” (the sound a cow makes) makes up about 40% of them, with “quack” (the sound a duck makes) coming in at a respectable 19%. These two beat out the other candidates on the farm in a search which also contained filters for “baa” (sheep), “oink” (pig), “cluck” (chick– no, not a duck, a chicken), “cock-a-doodle” (again, not a duck, buddy–), “gobble” (sigh), “honk” (OK this one, I grant you, does look like a duck), “neigh” (horse), and “bray” (grumpy horse).

___ Eggs and Ham

Red is the most common color in children’s literature, making up 16.8% of all children’s books that have a color in the title. Black (14.3%), blue (12.6%), white (10.4%), and green (9.7%) are next in line, followed by—true shocker here—gold, brown, and rainbow at about 5% each. That’s right. Yellow, the color of the sun, loses to rainbow. Orange at 1.8% I can get; it’s a hard word to pronounce. But yellow?

Amtrak Supreme

Among children’s books with a vehicle in the name, trains are #1, making up 11.8% of titles, with bus (10.6%), car (10.1%), truck (7.9%), and boat (6.2%) trailing after. Incredibly, that dominant performance holds even when you explicitly exclude Thomas the Tank Engine, probably because he’s a Tank Engine, and I didn’t filter for “Tank Engine” in the original search, having forgotten it was a vehicle type. Not every category is so robust to the loss of a single brand: Exclude Magic School Bus, and “bus” drops to 9.4% while “car” vrooms ahead.

Apex Predator

Bears beat dogs, cats, and the combined forces of team rabbit/bunny to be the number one animal in the title of children’s books. Without the alliance of rabbit and bunny, the fourth place role would be filled by dragons. About one in every 321 children’s books has “dragon” in the title, crushing others in the Fantasy Creatures category, including mermaid (1 in 1,411), minotaur (1 in 14,769) and jackalope (1 in 74,900). In other news, I believe I have identified a gap in the market. Please look out for The Yellow Minotaur, my soon-to-be-bestseller in the children’s category, hitting bookstores this fall.

Count With Me

Nearly 1 in 50 children’s books has “one,” “1,” or “first” in the title, which is twice as often as two appears and nearly three times as often as three. But the trend’s far from smooth: 100 appears more often than 11, and 101 appears more often than everything between 14 and 99 except 20 and 50. More proof that publishers are steering authors of children’s books towards titles like the snappy, college-inspired “Dogs 101” instead of the age-appropriate and factually accurate “My 14th Book About Dogs”.

Smooth Starts and Effortless Ends

Nearly 1 in 3 children’s books—a full 30.5%—have an alliterative title. What works, works. Don’t fix it if it’s fine.

All analyses were carried out using the Open Library API (https://openlibrary.org/), a Project of the Internet Archive.

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