September 8, 2004
Wordcount
Via Brandon, a wicked cool word tool: WORDCOUNT
is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.
Grand (1804) Text (1339) Auto (17171), fer instance.
September 9th, 2004 at 2:26 am
GREAT INTERFACE & a GREAT START…..
Suggestion: Integrate the # of senses each word has and build that into the analysis.
For example, the word “break” has the most senses with approx. 115 [can’t locate the reference I’ve seen, but did a quick count using WordNet(TM)]. Note though, it places 1090th in term of frequency.
Idea I Just Had:
1. The more frequently we use a word, the more desensitized we become to the word’s meaning. See psychological principle of ‘habituation’.
2. Number of word senses demonstrates the pervasiveness of the ‘concept’ embodied in the word.
3. What are the words that have the greatest number of senses AND are used the least often? Just have to apply the heuristic across all words and normalize between word senses and frequency data.
Let’s see that list!
If anyone actually follows up on this suggestion, please email me as I am genuinely curious, but have far too much else to do.
Much Thanks.
Ken Stein
September 11th, 2004 at 3:06 pm
WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, …