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39-533: It has been observed that, with a few exceptions, "the scholarship on lists remains fragmented". David Wallechinsky, a co-author of The Book of Lists , described the attraction of lists as being "because we live in an era of overstimulation, especially in terms of information, and lists help us in organizing what is otherwise overwhelming". While many lists have practical purposes, such as memorializing needed household items, lists are also created purely for entertainment, such as lists put out by various music venues of

78-768: A foreign language learning and teaching in Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese ( DeFrancis 1966 ). As a frequency toolkit, Da ( Da 1998 ) and the Taiwanese Ministry of Education ( TME 1997 ) provided large databases with frequency ranks for characters and words. The HSK list of 8,848 high and medium frequency words in the People's Republic of China , and the Republic of China (Taiwan) 's TOP list of about 8,600 common traditional Chinese words are two other lists displaying common Chinese words and characters. Following

117-413: A general to-do list (or task-holding file) to record all the tasks the person needs to accomplish and a daily to-do list which is created each day by transferring tasks from the general to-do list. An alternative is to create a "not-to-do list", to avoid unnecessary tasks. Task lists are often prioritized in the following ways. A completely different approach which argues against prioritizing altogether

156-690: A list evaluating things so that better items on the list are ahead of less good items is called ranking . Lists created for the purpose of ranking a subset of an indefinite population (such as the top 100 of the thousands of bands that have performed in a given genre) are almost always presented as round numbers . Studies have determined that a list of items falling within a round number has a substantial psychological impact, such that "the difference between items ranked No. 10 and No. 11 feels enormous and significant, even if it's actually quite minimal or unknown". The same list may serve different purposes for different people. A list of currently popular songs may provide

195-485: A multi-character word. It seems that Zipf's law holds for frequency lists drawn from longer texts of any natural language. Frequency lists are a useful tool when building an electronic dictionary, which is a prerequisite for a wide range of applications in computational linguistics . German linguists define the Häufigkeitsklasse (frequency class) N {\displaystyle N} of an item in

234-492: A ranked list) within some given text corpus, serving the purpose of vocabulary acquisition. Many connoisseurs or experts in particular areas will assemble "best of" lists containing things that are considered the best examples within that area. Where such lists are open to a wide array of subjective considerations, such as a list of best poems, best songs, or best athletes in a particular sport, experts with differing opinions may engage in lengthy debates over which items belong on

273-719: A task list. Task lists are also business management , project management , and software development , and may involve more than one list. When one of the items on a task list is accomplished, the task is checked or crossed off. The traditional method is to write these on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil , usually on a note pad or clip-board. Task lists can also have the form of paper or software checklists . Numerous digital equivalents are now available, including personal information management (PIM) applications and most PDAs . There are also several web-based task list applications, many of which are free. Task lists are often diarized and tiered. The simplest tiered system includes

312-555: Is a continuous study from which originate the Subtlex movement cited above. New et al. 2007 made a completely new counting based on online film subtitles. There have been several studies of Spanish word frequency ( Cuetos et al. 2011 ). Chinese corpora have long been studied from the perspective of frequency lists. The historical way to learn Chinese vocabulary is based on characters frequency ( Allanic 2003 ). American sinologist John DeFrancis mentioned its importance for Chinese as

351-433: Is based on a degree of opinion . Certainly, each "best of" list is based in some type of more scientific method than simple opinion, but this varies from list to list. Other "best of" lists are even more subjective, essentially coming down to a nonscientific approach to a single person's opinion. Lists of this sort still appear in mainstream media, such as Billboard magazine's "Top 30 Breakup Songs ". The practice of ordering

390-414: Is known to have various effects ( Brysbaert et al. 2011 ; Rudell 1993 ). Memorization is positively affected by higher word frequency, likely because the learner is subject to more exposures ( Laufer 1997 ). Lexical access is positively influenced by high word frequency, a phenomenon called word frequency effect ( Segui et al. ). The effect of word frequency is related to the effect of age-of-acquisition ,

429-652: Is the floor function . Frequency lists, together with semantic networks , are used to identify the least common, specialized terms to be replaced by their hypernyms in a process of semantic compression . Those lists are not intended to be given directly to students, but rather to serve as a guideline for teachers and textbook authors ( Nation 1997 ). Paul Nation 's modern language teaching summary encourages first to "move from high frequency vocabulary and special purposes [thematic] vocabulary to low frequency vocabulary, then to teach learners strategies to sustain autonomous vocabulary expansion" ( Nation 2006 ). Word frequency

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468-605: The "best bands" or "best songs" of a certain era. Such lists may be based on objective factors such as record sales and awards received, or may be generated entirely from the subjective opinion of the writer of the list. Musicologist David V. Moskowitz notes: There are now top 100 or top 10 lists of a great variety within the music industry and its associated media. Rolling Stone issues top 100 lists of albums, songs, guitarists, and bass players. Guitar Player and Bass Player magazines contain similar lists as do other types of music magazines. This type of "best of" list   ...

507-465: The American Brown study, entitled "Fréquences d'utilisation des mots en français écrit contemporain". More recently, the project Lexique3 provides 142,000 French words, with orthography , phonetic , syllabation , part of speech , gender , number of occurrence in the source corpus, frequency rank, associated lexemes , etc., available under an open license CC-by-sa-4.0 . This Lexique3

546-647: The SUBTLEX movement completed in five years full studies for French ( New et al. 2007 ), American English ( Brysbaert & New 2009 ; Brysbaert, New & Keuleers 2012 ), Dutch ( Keuleers & New 2010 ), Chinese ( Cai & Brysbaert 2010 ), Spanish ( Cuetos et al. 2011 ), Greek ( Dimitropoulou et al. 2010 ), Vietnamese ( Pham, Bolger & Baayen 2011 ), Brazil Portuguese ( Tang 2012 ) and Portugal Portuguese ( Soares et al. 2015 ), Albanian ( Avdyli & Cuetos 2013 ), Polish ( Mandera et al. 2014 ) and Catalan (2019 ). SUBTLEX-IT (2015) provides raw data only. In any case,

585-581: The age at which the word was learned. Below is a review of available resources. Word counting is an ancient field, with known discussion back to Hellenistic time. In 1944, Edward Thorndike , Irvin Lorge and colleagues hand-counted 18,000,000 running words to provide the first large-scale English language frequency list, before modern computers made such projects far easier ( Nation 1997 ). 20th century's works all suffer from their age. In particular, words relating to technology, such as "blog," which, in 2014,

624-439: The average person with suggestions for music that they may want to sample, but to a record company executive, the same list would indicate trends regarding the kinds of artists to sign to maximize future profits. Lists may be organized by a number of different principles. For example, a shopping list or a list of places to visit while vacationing might each be organized by priority (with the most important or most desired items at

663-422: The base word *possib* . For statistical purpose, all these words are summed up under the base word form *possib*, allowing the ranking of a concept and form occurrence. Moreover, other languages may present specific difficulties. Such is the case of Chinese, which does not use spaces between words, and where a specified chain of several characters can be interpreted as either a phrase of unique-character words, or as

702-432: The basic "word" unit should be defined. For Latin scripts, words are usually one or several characters separated either by spaces or punctuation. But exceptions can arise, such as English "can't", French " aujourd'hui ", or idioms. It may also be preferable to group words of a word family under the representation of its base word . Thus, possible, impossible, possibility are words of the same word family, represented by

741-469: The beginning of that work, and an index is a list of concepts or terms found in such a work, usually at the end of the work, and usually indicating where in the work the concepts or terms can be found. A track list is a list of songs on an album, and set list is a list of songs that a band will regularly play in concerts during a tour. A word list is a list of the lexicon of a language (generally sorted by frequency of occurrence either by levels or as

780-486: The corpus content, the corpus register , and the definition of " word ". While word counting is a thousand years old, with still gigantic analysis done by hand in the mid-20th century, natural language electronic processing of large corpora such as movie subtitles (SUBTLEX megastudy) has accelerated the research field. In computational linguistics , a frequency list is a sorted list of words (word types) together with their frequency , where frequency here usually means

819-417: The following. The Book of Lists The Book of Lists refers to any one of a series of books compiled by David Wallechinsky , his father Irving Wallace and sister Amy Wallace . Each book contains hundreds of lists (many accompanied by textual explanations) on unusual or obscure topics, for example: The first Book of Lists was published in 1977, a second volume came out in 1980 and

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858-424: The large number of subtitles available online to analyse large numbers of speeches. Brysbaert & New 2009 made a long critical evaluation of this traditional textual analysis approach, and support a move toward speech analysis and analysis of film subtitles available online. This has recently been followed by a handful of follow-up studies, providing valuable frequency count analysis for various languages. Indeed,

897-459: The list using the base 2 logarithm of the ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the most frequent item. The most common item belongs to frequency class 0 (zero) and any item that is approximately half as frequent belongs in class 1. In the example list above, the misspelled word outragious has a ratio of 76/3789654 and belongs in class 16. where ⌊ … ⌋ {\displaystyle \lfloor \ldots \rfloor }

936-403: The list, and in which order. A task list (also called a to-do list or "things-to-do") is a list of tasks to be completed, such as chores or steps toward completing a project. It is an inventory tool which serves as an alternative or supplement to memory . Writer Julie Morgenstern suggests "do's and don'ts" of time management that include mapping out everything that is important, by making

975-417: The most important either". A list that is sorted by some principle may be said to be following a ranking or sequence . Items on a list are often delineated by bullet points or a numbering scheme . Kinds of lists used in everyday life include: Many highly specialized kinds of lists also exist. For example, a table of contents is a list of the chapters or other features of a written work, usually at

1014-468: The most used syntax rules. It is claimed that 70 grammatical words constitute 50% of the communicatives sentence, while 3,680 words make about 95~98% of coverage. A list of 3,000 frequent words is available. The French Ministry of the Education also provide a ranked list of the 1,500 most frequent word families , provided by the lexicologue Étienne Brunet . Jean Baudot made a study on the model of

1053-481: The number of occurrences in a given corpus , from which the rank can be derived as the position in the list. Nation ( Nation 1997 ) noted the incredible help provided by computing capabilities, making corpus analysis much easier. He cited several key issues which influence the construction of frequency lists: Most of currently available studies are based on written text corpus , more easily available and easy to process. However, New et al. 2007 proposed to tap into

1092-443: The only relationships between data elements consist of the list predecessor and successor relationships". For example, in her book, Seriously... I'm Kidding , comedian Ellen DeGeneres provides a list of acknowledgements, notes her difficulty in determining how to order the list, and ultimately writes: "This list is in no particular order. Just because someone is first doesn't mean they're the most important. It doesn't mean they're not

1131-435: The purpose of vocabulary acquisition . A lexicon sorted by frequency "provides a rational basis for making sure that learners get the best return for their vocabulary learning effort" ( Nation 1997 ), but is mainly intended for course writers, not directly for learners. Frequency lists are also made for lexicographical purposes, serving as a sort of checklist to ensure that common words are not left out. Some major pitfalls are

1170-505: The subject areas ( Nation 1997 ). These now contain 1 million words from a written corpus representing different dialects of English. These sources are used to produce frequency lists ( Nation 1997 ). A review has been made by New & Pallier . An attempt was made in the 1950s–60s with the Français fondamental . It includes the F.F.1 list with 1,500 high-frequency words, completed by a later F.F.2 list with 1,700 mid-frequency words, and

1209-470: The third appeared in 1983. Book of Lists for the 1990s was published in 1993; yet another volume, The New Book of Lists , was published in 2005. The first volume was initially controversial and banned in some libraries and parts of the United States when it was published due to, among other things, a chapter that graphically described popular sexual positions and their pros and cons. The 2005 volume

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1248-415: The top and least important or least desired at the bottom), or by proximity, so that following the list will take the shopper or vacationer on the most efficient route. A list may also completely lack any principle of organization, if it does not serve a purpose for which such a principle is needed. An unsorted list is one "in which data items are placed in no particular order with respect to their content;

1287-495: The years, more than a hundred books with the Book of Lists in their title appeared. In 2005, a Canadian edition of The Book of Lists was published and credited to David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace, Ira Basen and Jane Farrow . The book contained a mixture of content from the original three volumes, mixed in with updated material, and material with a specifically Canadian focus. Wallace's story "The Abyssinian electric chair" (p. 463)

1326-635: Was #7665 in frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, was first attested to in 1999, and does not appear in any of these three lists. The Teacher Word Book contains 30,000 lemmas or ~13,000 word families (Goulden, Nation and Read, 1990). A corpus of 18 million written words was hand analysed. The size of its source corpus increased its usefulness, but its age, and language changes, have reduced its applicability ( Nation 1997 ). The General Service List contains 2,000 headwords divided into two sets of 1,000 words. A corpus of 5 million written words

1365-422: Was analyzed in the 1940s. The rate of occurrence (%) for different meanings, and parts of speech, of the headword are provided. Various criteria, other than frequence and range, were carefully applied to the corpus. Thus, despite its age, some errors, and its corpus being entirely written text, it is still an excellent database of word frequency, frequency of meanings, and reduction of noise ( Nation 1997 ). This list

1404-671: Was essentially "new" in name only; it was made up primarily of reprinted and updated lists selected from the first three volumes, which have gone out of print. Wallechinsky and Wallace were also responsible for editing The People's Almanac , which covered similar ground, as well as The Book of Predictions . They also contributed a weekly column in Parade magazine . Other authors who have followed this basic format include Russ Kick , author of The Disinformation Book of Lists , Louis Rukeyser , author of Louis Rukeyser's Book of Lists , and Bernard Schwartz with A Book of Legal Lists . During

1443-407: Was examined by historian Mike Dash in a Cliopatria award winning 2010 blog post which traces the story back to its probable source and concludes that Wallace's story is unlikely to be accurate. Word list A word list (or lexicon ) is a list of a language's lexicon (generally sorted by frequency of occurrence either by levels or as a ranked list) within some given text corpus , serving

1482-599: Was put forward by British author Mark Forster in his book "Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management". This is based on the idea of operating "closed" to-do lists, instead of the traditional "open" to-do list. He argues that the traditional never-ending to-do lists virtually guarantees that some of your work will be left undone. This approach advocates getting all your work done, every day, and if you are unable to achieve it, that helps you diagnose where you are going wrong and what needs to change. Various writers have stressed potential difficulties with to-do lists such as

1521-477: Was updated in 2013 by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips as the New General Service List . A corpus of 5 million running words, from written texts used in United States schools (various grades, various subject areas). Its value is in its focus on school teaching materials, and its tagging of words by the frequency of each word, in each of the school grade, and in each of

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