“It must needs be”

An archaic outlier with uneven distribution.

The phrase “it must needs be” occurs twenty-one times in the Book of Mormon. For those who might not know, needs is an archaic adverb in this context, conveying a meaning of ‘necessarily’ or ‘of necessity.’ It is not a verb with {-s} inflection.

“It must needs be” occurs only once in the King James Bible:

Matthew 18:7
Woe vnto the world because of offences: for it must needs be that offences come: but wo to that man by whom the offence commeth.

Because it is not a prominent biblical archaism, twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts do not have any examples. Consequently, dictating even one of these was not automatic for Joseph; yet he dictated more than twenty.

After 3 Nephi 8, the phrase begins to appear in the Book of Mormon at a much higher rate. For more than half the dictation (from Mosiah 1 to 3 Nephi 8), only three were dictated. After that, eighteen were dictated, despite only two being expected. That is a 8× per-word rate increase (1.69 per 10,000 words ÷ 0.21 per 10,000 words).

The most striking shift in English usage involves the subordinator after. Textual usage of “after that S” goes from zero before 3 Nephi 9, to 115 instances after. Broadly speaking, the text shifts to somewhat more archaic English usage at 3 Nephi 9.

As in so many other cases of English usage, the Book of Mormon is an outlier in its frequent use of “it must needs be.” The late sixteenth century was a peak period in terms of per-word rates, but usage intensity (rate × instances) remained elevated through more than half of the seventeenth century. The text with the most instances ever has eighty-five in about 950,000 words, published in 1664 [A43285]. The text with the highest rate and at least twenty instances was published in 1641 [A67026] (twenty-four in about 50,000 words).

Five early modern texts also have twenty-one instances, as well as the Book of Mormon. In terms of “it must needs be” usage, these five writings rank twenty-sixth among the texts of EEBO. This is where the Book of Mormon sits in this regard. (More than thirty potential spelling combinations were searched in EEBO.)

Twenty-one instances are the most to occur in a single text since 1678 [A35345], 151 years before 1829. Nineteen instances were the most found to occur in an eighteenth-century text in ECCO. The 1678 text has thirty-three instances in about 500,000 words.

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