- Home >
- Fork The System>
- How Expensive is Your Language
How Expensive is Your Language
I was inspired by the blog post Use the smallest word that does the job to explore how to calculate the expensiveness of a piece of writing. After some discussion with the author we agreed on this definition:
format_quoteformat_quote
The expensiveness of a word is inversely related to the likelihood the audience knows it.
Me and Critter
The site www.wordfrequency.info provides a list of the most commonly1 used words. I'm using that as a proxy for cheap words, meaning a word is expensive if it's not in the list.
If you want to see how expensive your writing is and you have an RSS feed, enter it below. We will compare it to some other feeds. You can do multiple feeds one per line.
One can also just past text into the Prose field to evaluate that text.
| Feed | Cheap | Expensive | Total Words | Cost per word | FK Grade Level |
|---|
Footnotes
1 I am using a list they provide with all word forms of the 5000 most common words.
©Erik Summerfield 2022
e2thex.org Last Updated: 3/22/2022