Re: Word length as a function of word frequency

Jeffrey:
> I thought I had read a web page addressing word length as a function of
> word frequency before,
The prediction should be "If frequent then short; if long then infrequent",
but not "If short then frequent; if infrequent then long". I'm not
sure what is the best way to test that statistically, but "average freq
for word of length x" is not going to work for short words.

> I had toyed with converting the words to phonetic representations but
> decided it wasn't worth my time.  Obviously, the number of phonemes in a
> word is a stronger function of word frequency than the length of the
> English spelling of the word, but I didn't feel like using SOUNDEX or
> Zompist.com's English spelling algorithm (56 rules! --
> http://www.zompist.com/spell.html) to come up with approximations of the
> phonetic length
Alternatively, you could use a file that lists words' pronunciations.
I have one I can send you, if you can't find one online. (Compiled
in Cambridge, called 'BEEP', iirc.) For the likes of you, the task
should be pretty simple. (The pronunciations are RP, but then your
stats were based on 100m words of BrE too.)

--And.