A124015 thoughts

[David Wilson]

The description of A124015 is

%N A124015 Number of words with n letters in the National Scrabble Association Dictionary.

Some notes:

- It should be noted that the NSAD includes a restricted set of English words (words of 2 to 14 letters, no proper nouns or derivatives, no words with non-alphabetic characters (e.g, contractions, hyphenated words), and it is this restricted set that is being counted.

- The edition of the NSAD used to create A124015 should be specified, since the NSAD is continually edited.  While I do not think that A124015 should change with each new edition of the NSAD, because it may be referenced in other literature. On the other hand, I don't think that a new sequence should be created for each new edition of the NSAD unless the new edition exhibits some interesting statistical departure from the current NSAD (e.g, in some future NSAD, the number of 9-letter words exceeds the number of 8-letter words). This is because I believe that the value of A124015 is mainly to indicate a distribution of English word lengths.

- On the other hand, I have always understood that 4-letter words are most common in literature (where small words appear more often). It might be interesting to create a sequence counting words of length n in the King James Bible, War and Peace, or some other suitably large and stable piece of English literature (we don't have to go overboard on this, just one or two examples indicating word length distributions in literature).

- Another interesting idea: In various languages, what is the distribution of the number of letters in the names of numbers from one to (say) one million?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.seqfan.eu/pipermail/seqfan/attachments/20061103/c33ce06e/attachment-0001.htm>