If you asked the average person what Enid Blyton’s favourite word was they’d probably say lashings or gosh or ginger beer. If you ask me I think she probably wrote hungry and lunch more often than any of those!

I happened to be thinking about The Treasure Hunters recently (my mind wanders as I do boring things like brush my teeth), and I wondered how many times Blyton’s books featured treasure – and honestly, it’s quite a few. But I could only think of two times that treasure appeared in the title – The Treasure Hunters, obviously, and Five on a Treasure Island.

That got me wondering what word was the most used in all her book titles. (I’m not getting into short story titles, or collections published after her death, or anything like that. Just book titles.)

Initial guesses

Trying to think of words that appeared a lot and my first thought was Five – as it’s in all 21 Famous Five titles, but probably not too many others, except Five Minute Tales and Five O’Clock Tales.

Cover from “Five Go Adventuring Again” illustrated by Eileen Soper

Even though I knew it was less-used, my brain helpfully pointed out that Seven was used quite a lot, as all the Secret Sevens have Seven in the title.

Dustjacket from the first edition by Burgess Sharrocks

Shock for the Secret Seven, 1962 Illustrator Unknown

Cover of the “Secret Seven Win Through” published 1955 possibly drawn by Bruno Kay.

So could it be adventure(s), I wondered? It’s in all eight Adventure Series titles, and I know there are plenty of other books like Adventure of the Strange Ruby, Five Fall into Adventure, (can I have Adventuring Again, too?) Secret Seven Adventure… so I felt that was a strong contender.

Then I started thinking about mystery, Obviously there are 15 Five Find-Outer books which all begin with The Mystery of… then there are two Famous Fives (Mystery Moor and Mystery to Solve), Secret Seven Mystery, plus all six Barney/R Mysteries, so quite a lot there too.

And of course there’s also Secret, which of course is in all 15 Secret Seven titles, 5 Secret Series books, one Famous Five, one Find-Outers, The Secret of Cliff Castle, The Adventure of the Secret Necklace, and probably others.

I’m almost surprised there isn’t a book called The Mystery of the Secret Adventure at this point. I’ve also read adventure/mystery/secret so many times that my brain has stopped recognising them as real words.

What’s the word?

The most popular title word wasn’t too hard to work out, thanks to the search function in the Cave of Books.

A straightforward search for adventure gives us 1,145 results across books, short stories, poems, magazines and periodicals. Secret has 735 and Mystery 427.

However there is a LOT of repetition in those results as various books have been reprinted many times, and it also includes jigsaws and card games, audiobooks, series titles and publishers etc. The same short stories also appear in multiple collections but are counted each time they appear.

So with my (only slightly arbitrary) limits on what to include what do the numbers look like then?

I figure there are 34 original books with Adventure (or adventures, but not adventuring) in the title, 28 with Secret and 25 with Mystery. No Mystery of the Secret Adventure, but The Adventure of the Secret Necklace, Secret Seven Adventure and Secret Seven Mystery are the closest, as they contain two of the most popular words each.

So my guesses were pretty good!

Here are those book titles below: