Frequency list

In computational linguistics, a frequency list is a sorted list of words (word types) together with their frequency, where frequency here usually means the number of occurrences in a given corpus. A short example could be:

the	3789654
he	2098762
[...]
king	57897
boy	56975
[...]
outragious	76
[...]
stringyfy	5
[...]
transducionalify	1

It seems that Zipf's law holds for frequency lists drawn from longer texts of any natural language. Frequency lists are a necessary prerequisite for building of an electronic dictionary, which is by itself a prerequisite for a wide range of applications in computational linguistics.

German linguists define the "häufigkeitsklasse" (frequency class) of an item in the list using the base 2 logarithm of the ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the most frequent item. The most common item belongs to frequency class 0 (zero) and any item that is half as frequent belongs in class 1. In the example list above, the misspelled word outragious has a ratio of 76/3789654 and belongs in class 16.:$N=0.5-log\_2left(frac\{\; ext\{Frequency\; of\; this\; item\{\; ext\{Frequency\; of\; most\; common\; item\; ight)$

See also

* Letter frequencies
* Most common words in English
* The Long Tail