Frequency of Occurrence of Speech Sounds in Written English
Godfrey Dewey · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1929
There has been much qualitative research by fonetists and acoustic engineers dealing with the speech sounds of English, but until lately very little quantitative analysis, which is equally important in determining the relative importance of the various speech elements—words, syllables, and sounds—as measured by their relative frequency of occurrence. The author's recent study entitled “Relative Frequency of English Speech Sounds” (Harv. Univ. Press) gives a classified quantitative analysis of the commoner words and syllables and all the sounds of 100,000 words of representative written English. The word count data show that 10 words—the of and to a in that it is I—make up over 25% of all writing; that 100 words, including of course these 10, make up over 50%; and justify the conclusion that the 1,000 commonest words of English will make up about 75% of all ordinary non-technical writing. The data on syllables and sounds, impossible to summarize briefly, are of far more important practical significance to the acoustic engineer than the word count data, and, unlike the latter, are at present the only authentic and comprehensive data in that field.