When I searched the text of Ulysses for the word crown I tried to tally its usage by its different definitions. About halfway through I gave up because of the incredible variety of the term’s usage. Crown and its variants (crowns, crowned, crowning) occur 48 times in the text: 39 times as a noun, seven times as an adjective, and twice as a verb. Within the category of ‘noun’ I also tallied the following subcategories: 12 times as currency, 4 times as a brand (Crown Derby china), and 6 times as an entity (“the Crown.”)

I had expected that most of the uses of the word would be in reference to currency, but exactly one fourth of them were. The other uses of crown range from the crown of foam on a glass of beer to the “rawskinned crown” of a shoe sole to the Northern Crown constellation. (Most of the 18 remaining noun usages all represent slightly different usages of the word.)

I thought that crown cropped up unusually often in Ulysses, but I wanted to be sure so I checked some other famous novels of the 1920s for usage of the word. I did a text search for crown in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Mrs. Dalloway – and found that the word is not used a single time in any of the three texts. If I end up looking further into this term, I will definitely check more texts (and try to find some that are comparable to Ulysses in terms of length) but I think its glaring absence in the work of three of Joyce’s most well known contemporaries is proof enough that things worth noting are happening with crown. The sheer variety and frequency with which the term is used has piqued my interest and I look forward to digging deeper into the contexts it appears in.

P.S. I didn’t find any uses of this definition of crown during my cursory survey, but it’s still interesting to note that during childbirth, crowning describes the moment when an infant’s head appears in the birth canal.