Wordly wisdom
Why are some words short and others long? For decades, a prominent theory has held that words used frequently are short in order to make language efficient: It would not be economical if “the” were as long as “phenomenology,” in this view. But now a team of MIT cognitive scientists has developed an alternative notion, on the basis of new research: A word’s length reflects the amount of information it contains.“It may seem surprising, but word lengths are better predicted by information content than by frequency,” says Steven Piantadosi, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), and the lead author of a paper on the subject that evaluates word use in 11 languages. The paper was published online last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The notion that frequency of use engenders shorter words stems from work published by Harvard...