Frequency and Age as Characteristics of a Word

1. The problem of rdation between the frequency and age of a word is only a small part of the general problem of opposition of the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language. The frequency is obviously a purely synchronic characteristic of a word whereas the age (the time interval t between the appearance of the word and the present moment) is a purely diachronic one. However there is a simple dependence between both characteristics: the old age of a word corresponds to a high frequency ranking and vice-versa: among the words with low frequency the proportion of ancient words is small. The existence of this dependency was first discovered by G. K. Zlvr (1947). 2. To obtain this dependency in analytical form let us split the whole frequency dictionary into a number of groups of equal size (n words in each of the groups).* Each group consists of words of equal or nearly equal values of frequency. The most frequently used n words belong to the group with rank 1, the following n words constitute the group with rank 2 and the words having in the dictionary numbers from (i-1) n + 1 till i.n constitute a group with rank i. Then the ratio N(i, t) of words with an age equal to or greater than t in the i-th group of the dictionary is: where K is a constant. 3. There is a simple method to obtain (2) from (1). Formula (2) gives us the distribution in the dictionary of words with age t, t, < t ~ t~ :