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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consideration the application of the method has been restricted to a 

 study of the relative frequencies of the use of words of different lengths. 

 The method of procedure is simple and will be best explained by an 

 example. One thousand words in 'Vanity Fair/ taken in consecutive 

 order of course, were counted and classified as to the number of letters 

 in each with the following result : 



Letters— 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 

 Words— 25 169 232 187 109 78 79 48 28 20 10 10 2 3 



The graphic exhibition of this result is made by the well-known 

 method of rectangular coordinates, using the number of letters in a 

 word as the abscissa and the corresponding number of words in a thou- 

 sand as the ordinate. On a sheet of 'squared' paper the numbers showing 

 letters in each word, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., are placed along the horizontal line 

 and on the vertical above each of these is put a point whose distance 

 from the base shows the number of corresponding words in every thou- 

 sand, according to the scale shown at the left. These points are then 

 joined by straight lines and the whole broken line may be called the 

 'word spectrum' or 'characteristic curve' of the author as derived from 

 the group of words considered. The group of 1,000 words from 

 '^7'anity Fair' enumerated above is thus graphically represented by the 

 continuous line in Fig. 1, and the method of constructing the charac- 

 teristic curve will be readily understood by comparing this with the 

 numbers given. As a thousand is a very small number in a problem of 

 this kind, the curve representing any single group of that number of 

 words is practically certain to differ more or less from that of any 

 other such group. In Fig. 1 the dotted line represents a group of 1,000 



words, immediately follow- 

 ing that already referred to. 

 Perhaps the most astonishing 

 thing about these two lines is 

 not that they differ, but that 

 they agree as well as they do. 

 It is really remarkable that 

 any marked peculiarity in 

 the use of words is almost 

 sure to be revealed in this 

 way, even in comparatively 

 small groups. In the two 

 diagrams of Fig. 1 it is inter- 

 esting to note their general sameness, especially as shown in a tendency 

 to equality of words of six and seven letters and also in words of eleven 

 and twelve letters. 



When the number of words in each group is increased there is, of 



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 

 Fig. 1. Two Groups— 1000 each— Vanity Fair. 



