Trigrams
& Bigrams
Trigrams
Ted, for example, recently
sought through all the files in the Compendium to find the frequencies
of the 17,576 possible trigrams, sets of three letters from the 26 in the
alphabet. A quite small program (60 lines of code) quickly produced all
the frequencies and a complete analysis of them, as shown by the following
tables, first published in WordsWorth magazine for October 2000.
Note that 44% possible Trigrams
do not occur at all. The counts are the number of different trigrams having
the same frequency, 0; 1; 2; 3; and ranges 4 - 100; etc. A check will reveal
that 55% of all trigrams have frequencies less than four.
Bigrams
Another search, this time
for bigrams within a word, revealed the plural SOMATOSTATINOMAS, of a type
of tumour. Its 16 letters yield 15 consecutive bigrams, each of which is
a valid word (see the April 1998 WordsWorth), all of which are to be found
in the Chambers Official Scrabble Words 1995. In its singular form, this
word could form part of normal Scrabble© word play, leading to a score
for a 15 -letter word!
It would not be an easy
task to discover a word with such properties from the database directly;
a simple program, which would read its words one bigram at a time, checking
whether they existed in the 2-letter files as words, is a doddle!
More references to Word Puzzles
can be found in Ted Clarke's new book "HOW THICK IS A SHADOW?"
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