This article examines how design transformations are described in one specific but important context: patents. Using text analytics, we examined term frequency and term frequency-inverse document frequency from 33,100 full patents from 2017 sourced from the US Patent and Trade Office. Using a corpus-based approach, we developed lexicons to capture two general types of design transformation: addition and subtraction. In patent data we collected and analyzed, addition design transformations were more common than subtraction design transformations (2.7:1). The ratio of addition to subtraction was higher than ratios in non-design texts (1:2.5). While patents represent one area of design, and the patent texts we analyzed were not necessarily written by designers themselves, something about the process that produces patents leads to far greater use of addition than subtraction. We discuss possible reasons for and implications of these findings.