THE WORD BAROMETER 01

Almost a quarter of all occurrences have two letters.

In the public CoRoLa frequency list, 908 distinct two-letter forms account for 150,476,505 occurrences out of 637,764,339.

Measure the air in your own sentence
CO.RO.LA / FORM02 LETTERS
23.6%of occurrences
The share of occurrences carried by two-letter forms.
A simple measure

Short forms carry the sentence.

Forms with six letters or fewer make up 349,975 of 1,813,746 distinct forms. Across the counted occurrences, those same forms reach 362,222,723 of 637,764,339.

distinct forms19.3%
occurrences56.8%

The same limit: six letters or fewer.

Your measure

Write a sentence and let its rhythm show.

Each word receives a height equal to its number of letters. The ochre line marks six letters, the threshold at which short forms pass half of all occurrences.

The strip uses one measure: the number of letters in each word.

Write with diacritics, punctuation, and whatever rhythm arrives.

YOUR SENTENCE7 words
Morning7
finds5
its3
rhythm6
in2
short5
words5
six letters, the reference line

Your sentence has 7 words and an average of 4.7 letters per word. 6 of them have six letters or fewer.

AVERAGE4.7letters / word
UNDER LINE6 / 7words
LETTERS33in your sentence
Word-length distribution

By six letters, the air is already full.

The bars follow occurrences, not the number of forms. Every percentage is calculated from the 637,764,339 occurrences in the CoRoLa list.

occurrences100% = the full list
10.03%
223.59%
37.25%
49.62%
57.28%
69.03%
79.21%
89.32%
99.00%
106.45%
122.67%
140.68%
160.10%
200.00%
21+0.02%
Form length, in letters. The marks between 11 and 20 are left out to keep the scale readable.
Close to the number

What does “occurrence” mean here?

An occurrence is one appearance of a form in the counted texts. The list keeps the exact lowercase form with diacritics; “de”, “despre”, and “deși” are three different forms.

CoRoLa brings together spoken and written texts from different periods, fields, and registers. The result describes this published selection and keeps its limits visible.