APPJENDIX. Ill 



1 first counted in A, S, C, P the four letters most frequently 

 used, then in E, H, L and others about the mean, and then in 

 K, Y, Z those which occur rarest as initials. 



I. 



Letter. 

 4 f A pp 



lis 



2 1 C 



3 P 



9 f F 



10 

 11 

 12 



13 ] H 



17 L w 



23 I K 



24 \ Y 



25 i Z 



Total, 4420 1599 



N. B. The nnmbers prefixed to the letters in the first column denote the 

 order of frequency of those letters as initials. 



This would give 33,456 words in my vocabulary, and this seems 

 too great. I cannot see, however, how my process is not a fair 

 one. One point where I may be in fault, may be in the determi- 

 nation of the total number of words included. At the beginning 

 and at the end of each letter of the alphabet there is a blank 

 space, which I have estimated can hardly be more than 15-100 

 of a page on the average, or 4 or at most 5 pages in all. This 

 space has been counted as full, and hence we ought to subtract 

 from 92,488 = the total number of words, about 300 on this 

 account. Dr. Webster states in his preface to the first edition, 

 that it contains between 70,000 and 80,000 words ; and in the 

 preface to the edition of 1840 it is stated that "several thousand" 

 words have been added. Probably there are at least 90,000 words 

 included: which would reduce the number of "words used," 

 slightly. The entire number of words in the latest editions of 

 Webster's Dictionary is 110,000, and I am convinced that the 

 error in the concluded total number of words is not great. 



It then becomes important to scrutinize carefully the other 

 term of the ratio, i. e., the number of words marked as nsed. As 

 I stated, on examining several pages of words which I marked 

 as used, I found an error of about one per cent. 



Since my first scrutiny I have asked my friend Mr. Farquhar, 



* The nnmbers in column IV, opposite numbers in column III, dis- 

 tinguished with asterisks, were derived by multiplying such discriminated 

 numbers by 72.2 = the average nun)ber of words on a page. 



(18) 



