How the Unabomber's unique linguistic fingerprints led to his capture
theconversation.com
Similar techniques used to identify criminals have been employed to unmask anonymous authors. But they aren’t foolproof.

In the light of Unabomber’s passing away in prison, people are reviewing how he was captured, and how linguistics played a role on this.

Linguistic analysis of his Manifesto yielded the following pieces of info:

  • “rearing children” - typical for a Northern USA dialect
  • “clew”, “wilfully” - back then, used mostly around Chicago; so the author likely spent his formative years around the place
  • “broad”, “chick” - narrowing down the expected age range to middle-aged
  • “anomic”, “chimerical” - highly educated speaker

The article also mentions a few other cases of linguistic analysis being used to identify other people, such as JK Rowling as the Cuckoo’s Nest author.