Information content and word frequency in natural language: Word length matters

Abstract

For centuries, scientists have attempted to uncover commonalities that underlie the structure of human languages (1). In a recent issue of PNAS, Piantadosi et al. (2) reported an exciting finding with respect to one unique type of language universal. The authors empirically demonstrated that word length strongly correlated with information content across 11 distinct natural languages. This finding is remarkable in that it directly contravenes Zipf's principle of least effort, which holds that language optimizes communication by spontaneously truncating words as a function of their relative frequency (e.g., television → TV). Simply stated, more frequent words tend to be shorter, and this length–frequency relationship serves an adaptive function of communicative parsimony.