We’ll come back to this in a moment, because it’s important. There are relatively few three-letter words in English overall, and profane words are almost twice as likely to have three letters than you’d expect, all things being equal. Perhaps more surprising is how many profane three- and five-letter words there are. The 29 profane four-letter words in our list are significantly more than you’d expect if profane words were like English words in general, in which case we’d expect only 12.6 profane four-letter words out of 84. But what really sticks out is how many more profane four-letter words there are than expected from English in general. And in general English looks like a smoother version of the profane distribution. As you can see, English has a lot of words with four, five, six, or seven letters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |