In this subsection we ignore the fact that words have different frequencies. So for the average word length, each word is considered equally. For a fixed word length, we count the number of different words having this length.
The plot of the word length against the number of words of this length usually has a clear maximum between 10 and 15. Moreover, with a logarithmic scale of the y-axis, we get a nearly linear part between length 15 and 40.
Average word length is one of the classic parameters for a language.
Counting without multiplicity makes average word length depending on the corpus size. A larger corpus contains more words, and the additional words are usually longer. Hence, average word length should increase with corpus size.
Average word length:
select avg(char_length(word)) from words where w_id>100;;
Data for large table:
SELECT @all:=count(*) from words where w_id>100;
select char_length(word), 100*count(*)/@all from words where w_id>100 group by char_length;
Do we have the linear part between 15 and 40 for (nearly) all languages?
Where does it come from?
Calculate and compare the slope!
3.5.1.2 Words by Length with multiplicity