Words

A study provided an up-to-date source of word frequency information based in the kinds of reading materials to which high school and first-year college students are exposed. A corpus of 14,360,884 words was assembled from a comprehensive listing of reading materials from curriculum surveys, state curriculum guides, private school reading lists, research surveys, federal reports, recommended reading lists, and other sources. Included in the sample of reading materials were American and British novels, poetry, drama, essays, biographies, autobiographies, current periodicals, historical documents, and text from an encyclopedia. The following statistics were generated: (1) the overall frequency of occurrence of each word in the corpus; (2) an index of dispersion for each word over 27 text categories; (3) an estimate of the number of occurrences per one million words of running text for each word that would be expected in a similar but different corpus; and (4) a standard frequency index developed from a logarithmic transformation. (Contains 43 references and 7 tables of data. Appendixes present a list of materials surveyed, and a list of materials sampled for word count.) (RS) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********t*************************************************************..10a