322 BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL 



made, similarly for the "1" of "peop/e" and the "n" of "notion." 

 Aside from these no single consonant occurs as often as 50 per cent of 

 the time after a particular vowel. With five vowels a particular 

 consonant ends the syllable more than 25 per cent of the time. In 

 nearly every case the most frequent combinations can be traced directly 

 to the first 50 words of the vocabulary. Five vowels are preceded by 

 blanks more than 50 per cent of the time and eight are followed by 

 blanks in more than 50 per cent of the cases. The combinations of 

 different vowels with compound consonants vary considerably in 

 importance, ranging in the final position from practically none with the 

 vowel of "pew" up to the vowel of "pun," which is terminated by a 

 compound consonant 63 per cent of the time. 



Conclusion 



In concluding, a brief review is presented of the main points of 

 interest. The paper has for its basis a Hst of 80,000 words obtained 

 from telephone conversations. This list has been studied with respect 

 to the number of different words contained in it, the relative occurrence 

 of the different speech sounds and the combinations of sounds which 

 form syllables. In so far as the authors know this is the first study 

 of this type based on conversations as contrasted with written matter. 



Perhaps the most striking aspect of the word list is the small number 

 of different words contained in it, only 2,240 out of the total of 80,000. 

 Of these 2,240 words 819 occur only once. The balance, or 1,421 words, 

 constitute practically 99 per cent of the total words recorded ; of these 

 the 121 different words which constitute the minor parts of speech 

 form 45,000 of the total occurrences. The pronouns "I" and "you" 

 together occur over 7,500 times. 



This intensiveness with which a small number of words is used in 

 conversation is considerably greater than in the written English ana- 

 lyzed by Dewey. In conversation the 155 most frequently used words 

 make up 80 per cent of the total occurrences; to reach the same per- 

 centage in the written English analyzed by Dewey 640 words must be 

 included. The frequently used words of conversation are character- 

 ized, as compared with written English, by the greater prominence of 

 certain active verbs, such as "get," "see," "know," etc., 12 of which 

 occur in the first 50 words of conversation, while there are none in the 

 first 50 words of written English. The most frequent words of con- 

 versation differ from written English also in the greater number of 

 words of Latin origin which appear frequently in conversation: 11 from 

 the first 100 of the list for conversation, as compared with two from 

 the first 100 of written English. 



