word frequency

USAGE SUMMARY

'word frequency' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to how often a particular word appears in a text. For example: "An analysis of the word frequency reveals that the word 'trees' appears most frequently in this document."

✓ Grammatically correct

Science

Academia

News & Media

Human-verified examples from authoritative sources

Exact Expressions

59 human-written examples

Effects of Speaking Rate and Word Frequency on Conversational Pronunciations.

University of California, Berkeley

Stimuli were controlled for phonology, word frequency, and length.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Word frequency influenced verb naming, but not verb fluency, performance.

Brain and Language

He then used word frequency counts to identify the key words that were flagging the messages.

The New York Times

From that, researchers correlated word frequency and personality traits from the 10 million postings.

The New York Times - Tech

The second observational study is based on word frequency analysis of the lyrics of popular songs.

Harvard Business Review

We find that the word frequency distribution P f) is characterized by two scaling regimes.

Nature

FRR is derived from a ranking index of a word according to its word frequency.

Expert Systems with Applications

These formulas generally use some combination of sentence length, word length, word frequency, and paragraph length.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

Both programs succeeded — one using grammatical and semantic signals, the other using word frequency.

The New York Times - Books

Van Petten, C. & Kutas, M. Interactions between sentence context and word frequency in event-related brain potentials.

Nature

Expert writing Tips

Best practice

Use "word frequency" when discussing statistical properties of language or data analysis. It is most effective when paired with descriptors like 'high', 'low' or 'objective' to specify the nature of the data.

Common error

Avoid using "word frequency" when you simply mean the total length of a document. Frequency refers to the rate of occurrence of specific lexical items relative to the whole, not the absolute size of the text.

Linguistic Context

The phrase "word frequency" functions as a compound noun that serves as a technical descriptor in statistical and linguistic analysis. It often acts as a noun adjunct (e.g., 'word frequency analysis') or a direct object in sentences describing research methodologies found in Ludwig.

Expression frequency: Very common

Frequent in

Science

65%

Academia

20%

News & Media

15%

Less common in

Formal & Business

5%

Social Media

3%

Encyclopedias

2%

Ludwig's WRAP-UP

The phrase "word frequency" is an essential and grammatically correct term used extensively in professional and scientific writing. Ludwig AI confirms that it is the most important variable in language research, appearing in over 50 high-authority examples ranging from cognitive neuroscience to social media analytics. Whether you are analyzing a political speech or studying how children learn to read, "word frequency" provides a precise way to describe the density and repetition of vocabulary. It is rarely found in casual conversation but remains a vital tool for anyone performing quantitative content analysis.

More alternative expressions

Phrases that express similar concepts, ordered by semantic similarity:

lexical frequency

Uses a more technical linguistic term for words

term frequency

Commonly used in computer science and information retrieval

usage frequency

A broader term that can apply to phrases or grammar patterns

word prevalence

Focuses more on how widespread a word is across different texts

token frequency

Specific to natural language processing and corpus analysis

occurrence rate

A more general statistical term for how often something happens

word count

Refers to the total number of words rather than the rate of a specific word

vocabulary distribution

Describes the spread of words across a whole dataset

linguistic frequency

A more general category including sounds or syntax

relative frequency

A mathematical term emphasizing the ratio rather than the count

FAQs

What is the meaning of "word frequency"?

In linguistics and data science, "word frequency" refers to the number of times a particular word appears in a given text or corpus. According to Ludwig, it is a primary variable in language research.

What can I say instead of "word frequency"?

Depending on your field, you can use specialized terms like "lexical frequency" in linguistics or "term frequency" in data analysis.

Is "word frequency" a formal term?

Yes, it is highly formal and standard in scientific journals and academic research. It is frequently seen in sources like Nature and ScienceDirect when discussing cognitive processing or text mining.

What is the difference between "word frequency" and "word count"?

A "word count" is the total number of words in a text, whereas "word frequency" is the measurement of how often a specific word appears within that total count.