This is a toy inspired by a Twitter comment, and that should tell you all you need to know about the practical value of this.
Start typing your novel into the box below and, if you have JavaScript enabled and I haven't screwed up somewhere, you will find your characters being automatically killed off every 50 words.
Since this is a toy, I do not promise logic, sanity or grammar.
Tweet your own contributions to my list of random deaths to @dorward. If you get some amusing output, then please blog it and tweet me the link.
The spacebar is magical, it is the act of pressing the spacebar after typing the 50th (100th, 150th, etc) word that sends the coffee fueled scribes hunting for names in your text.
Pasting is also magical. Without regard to the number of words in the text, if you paste something and the complete text includes at least one character, then one of them will die.
You will find that characters sharing names with English words (Smith and John for example) will be immortal as names are compared against a dictionary ("John Smith" is not a dictionary word though, so he should be afraid, very afraid). In retrospect, I'd probably have been better off looking to see if a name was at the start of a sentence instead of being in the dictionary (but that would have got its own set of false positives and negatives)