Save a Letter, Add a Choice
An Exercise in Dictionary Science
2 min readJul 5, 2022
Based on a quick and dirty analysis of 1224 words from the Encyclopaedia Britannica learner’s dictionary, the number of meanings of a word is roughly an exponential function of its length with a negative exponent (see the picture). Shorter words have more meanings, and longer words have fewer meanings. I may have an explanation for this dependency.