Harry yelled, Hermione shrieked, Ron grumbled

We recently finished listening to Stephen Fry’s narration of the seven Harry Potter books over a series of family road trips. He’s an excellent voice actor, and it’s quite a feat, but we got tired of how shrill his voice became every time he spoke Hermione’s dialogue. To be fair, the text itself is clearly prompting this - she’s often described as shrieking or squeaking, unlike Ron or Harry. This made me wonder exactly how much more often she is written this way, so I decided to count.

I found a list of 134 synonyms for “said”, then searched the text of all seven books to count how many times the words “Harry said” or “said Harry” occurred, repeated this for Ron and Hermione, then did this again for each of the synonyms on my list. I found “said” and 51 synonyms used 7085 times for these characters over the million or so words in the series. By far the most common term is “said”, which they each use between 80% to 85% of the time they speak. The rest of the time, however, Rowling describes Hermione’s speech very differently than Harry or Ron. All three often whisper and gasp, but it’s almost exclusively Hermione who cries, screams, shrieks, squeals, squeaks, wails, whimpers, sobs, giggles, or screeches (in that order of frequency). (To be precise, Harry cries once and screams twice, but otherwise the above list is unique to Hermione.) Only Ron grumbles, pipes up, complains, or howls, and only Harry chuckles, frets, nags, states, thunders, or vents. Both Ron and Harry often mutter, yell, or shout.

It’s clearly not just Stephen Fry who views Hermione this way, although he does seem to speak her parts this way even more often than Rowling’s text tells him to. As my partner helpfully pointed out, since dialogue for all three is usually written with “said”, when Fry uses a shrieking voice the rest of the time, it’s his own bias he’s adding on top of Rowlings’ already sexist depiction of the character who seems to exist just to do everyone’s homework and emotional labour.

For complete word counts, see the source data in Google Docs.