Across literary texts, the term “speculator” has been employed with notable flexibility. In narratives centered on slavery, such as those by Harriet Jacobs ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]) and Solomon Northup ([9]), the word often carries a pejorative connotation, referring to unscrupulous slave traders who profit from the dehumanization and exploitation of people. In contrast, novels like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair ([10]), Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt ([11]), as well as works like The Gilded Age ([12], [13]) and The Count of Monte Cristo ([14], [15]), use “speculator” to denote risk-taking financial investors or real estate dealers—figures whose speculative ventures embody modern economic anxieties. Additionally, more academic and philosophical texts, including Latin translations ([16], [17]) and Galen’s writings ([18]), invoke the term in its broader sense of one who ponders or theorizes, demonstrating the evolving and multifaceted nature of the word in literature.