tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4953008377950396317.post4757684197164743965..comments2024-03-28T18:39:59.184-07:00Comments on SearchReSearch: Wednesday Search Challenge (May 4, 2011): How common are adjectives describing animal-like characteristics?Dan Russellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13603209997260423532noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4953008377950396317.post-57324381556911031562011-05-05T01:42:29.791-07:002011-05-05T01:42:29.791-07:00Went to http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
piscine htt...Went to http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/<br /><br />piscine http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=piscine&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Reached a high usage around 1870. Dropped and leveled during the 20th century<br /><br />lupine http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=lupine&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Reached a high usage around 1930. Recently growing in usage.<br /><br />vulpine http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=vulpine&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Reached a high usage around 1900. Has since dropped and leveled off.<br /><br />bovine http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=bovine&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Low frequency usage until the 20th century when usage began to grow reaching a peak in the 1980's. Has since dropped off.krossbowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07877826327758153784noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4953008377950396317.post-22817496535205182242011-05-04T23:36:14.213-07:002011-05-04T23:36:14.213-07:00When I searched for [frequency lists] in Google I ...When I searched for [frequency lists] in Google I found a link to Wiktionary (the lexical companion to Wikipedia): http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists<br /><br /><br />There I searched the Project Gutenberg frequency lists. These lists are the most frequent words, when performing a simple, straight (obvious) frequency count of all the books found on Project Gutenberg (typically book editions published before 1923). Frequencies listed here are per billion.<br />bovine = 484.174<br />vulpine = 109.176<br />lupine = 90.9804<br />piscine = 34.8099<br />So the relative frequency is:<br />bovine: 13.9<br />vulpine: 3.1<br />lupine: 2.6<br />piscine: 1<br /><br /><br />Another hit linked me to the British National Corpus http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/<br />The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written.<br /><br />A search on this page: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/using/index.xml?ID=simple gave me the following results (number of hits in the corpus):<br />bovine 216<br />piscine 6<br />vulpine 5<br />lupine 1Hanshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16362447090339269962noreply@blogger.com