All Images
Research News
Why Context Matters in the Long and Short of Words
In 1935, Harvard University linguist George Kingsley Zipf asserted that "the magnitude of words tends, on the whole, to stand in an inverse, not necessarily proportionate, relationship to the number of occurrences." In other words, short words are used more frequently than long ones. Now, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have demonstrated a substantial improvement to Zipf's law.
Credit: Adrian Apodaca, National Science Foundation
Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (714 KB)
Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer.