Quote: the number of meanings for a word is the square root of the word's frequency; e.g., Thorndike's index of 10 million running words

Quotation Skeleton

[From the vocabulary balance between the Forces of Unification and Diversification, we may conjecture that the number of meanings for a word will equal the average frequency per meaning for the word and hence equal the square root of the frequency of the word.] … [p. 29] A glance at [the number of meanings graphed on log-log paper with the rank order of E.L. Thorndike's index of 10 million running words] suffices to show … theoretically expected negative slope of .5   Google-1   Google-2

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Topic: words in natural languages (40 items)