Questions tagged [frequency-analysis]
When looking into the etymology of a word or phrase, it can often be interesting to see how multiple phrases develop over time and compared to each other. N-grams can be used to visualise the occurrence of words and phrases over time and compared to each other.
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Is "take a profit" correct in this sentence? "take profit" vs "take a profit" across centuries
Mandelbrot writes in chapter XII of The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence:
Suppose big news has inflated a stock price by 40 percent in a week, more than twice its normal ...
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How can the drop in the use of the term 'mental health' in the 80s be explained?
I struggle to explain the drop in the 80s. Any ideas? The term 'health' shows a similar trend during this period.
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Is "you've been snuggledorfed" a hapax legomenon?
Near the start of Are Species "Real"? by Gutsick Gibbon, they say:
I hate to say it, but you have been tricked. You've been duped. You have been bamboozled. And to put it rather bluntly, ...
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What is the difference between Ghost and Apparition?
I'm stuck at getting the clear and sharp difference between these two words. WikiDiff says:
As nouns the difference between apparition and ghost is that apparition is an act of becoming visible; ...
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What do you call the set of ngrams?
A lexicon is a list of words that belong to a particular language (see this answer).
Is there a name for "the set of all ngrams" ? I mean the set of all consecutive words (collocations and ...
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Why the increase in usage of the word "quarantine" between around 1880 and 1930?
I was thinking today that the word "quarantine", since 2020, has probably seen an increase in usage unprecedented since the advent of the printing press. Hastening to Google Ngrams to verify ...
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Why is "he" twice as common as "she" in the English language
When you look at word frequency data in English such as the Corpus Of Contemporary American English (COCA) he appears on 16th place with 6500 occurrences per mil and she at 35th place with 3210 per ...
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Why did "denigrate" greatly increase in usage during the mid-20th century?
An acquaintance of mine claimed that "denigrate" had racist origins. Researching this turned up that the word comes from Middle English, making said claim rather unlikely. However, I also ...
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Is there any dictionary look-up frequency list?
The Online Portuguese Dictionary Dicio offers a (arbitrarily long) list of words ordered by look-up frequency. I find such a list very useful when selecting words to learn as a native speaker because ...
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What letter pairs are the most frequent in English written text? [closed]
Just as there is a common frequency of single letter occurrences which is very easy to find, is there a list of the most common letter pairs in English? I’m looking for a concrete list.
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Is there a frequency of the use of different parts of speech in English?
I am wondering if there has been any research on the statistical frequency of the different parts of speech. I'm looking for something like "20% nouns, 13% verbs, 10% adjectives, 11% prepositions,...
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Most basic/common words in spoken English
I need a sorted list of the most frequent spoken English words for everyday situations. Think of the most important words for a beginner learning the language. When learning new words, you'd want to ...
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Is there a frequency chart to see which phonemes any given letter can represent in English orthography?
Everything is in the title.
For example, we know that the letter A can represent nine possible sounds in British Received Pronunciation:
The short “a” as in at. /æ/
The long “a” as in ate. /eɪ/
It ...
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'The phrase “cute puppy,”is not considered a collocation.' Is this correct?
I am a data scientist who has a question about collocations based on a book I am reading. The book is "Feature Engineering for Machine Learning: Principles and Techniques for Data Scientists" by ...
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In man's stead: Downturn in usage of 'man' and its replacement
For the past century the usage of man has declined; it's decline quickened around 1970. These downturns make sense and correspond to a movement to use more gender neutral language.
What is replacing ...
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Where have all the erections gone?
I was experimenting with Google's ngram tool, and came upon this curious result:
My assumption would have been with the more open attitudes towards discussion of sex, usage for "erection" would have ...
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Unexpected Google Ngram for "wifi" [closed]
If we look at the word "internet", we can see that it was virtually unused until around 1990.
Next, if we look at the word "wifi" we can see that there was a huge jump in around 2000.
My question is ...
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The "F-word" in N-gram Viewer
I was simply fiddling with Ngram viewer when my apparently naughty mind made me type the (real) "F-word" onto the text field, (the time was also chosen randomly, (1750-to-1993)), the results baffled ...
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