Word lists by frequency
Frequency dictionaries ( also: Frequency Dictionaries ) reflect the vocabulary of a language, an author, a text type etc. again, the frequency with which occur the individual words in a text or corpus, is the main target of the compilation. If you can not perform an overall evaluation of the texts in question, it is a necessary condition for the creation of a frequency dictionary that you can evaluate a sufficiently representative text corpus for the issues involved so that frequency lists obtained provide a picture of the totality of the data.
The most common frequency dictionaries are probably those who are supposed to represent the vocabulary of a language as a whole. They allow you to gain information as to what needs to be vocabulary most commonly used and therefore first learned, for example, in the mother tongue education or even in foreign language teaching. It allows you to track all practical purposes. But other applications, beyond the satisfaction of mere curiosity addition, are possible: Thus, for some elementary knowledge of language due to the frequency dictionaries win: The most famous of Zipf's law is one of them, which states that the product of rank and frequency of words in a nearly constant size results. Other Implications: The more frequent are the words, the shorter they are, the older but they are. So frequency dictionaries have both practical and theoretical value and are important working principles of language statistics and beyond of Quantitative Linguistics.
Frequency dictionaries of the German
The individual dictionaries can, even if the text frequency is the supreme criterion to be applied widely. Was groundbreaking Kaeding (1897 /98), a company in which more than 11 million words have been captured and was a role model for appropriate things to do in other languages . In this dictionary, the words are on the one hand alphabetically, on the other hand, the order of frequency; obtain information about the frequency of the word stem and word-formation activity of the word. Wängler (1963 ) contains the vocabulary of a spoken language corpus and a newspaper corpus both for each separately by themselves and together, also sorted alphabetically and by frequency, but is limited to the words that occurred at least 10 times. Meier (1967 ) is an alphabetical list of Kaedingschen vocabulary again, also limited to those who are covered at least 10 times. Rosengren (1972 /77) leads the vocabulary from Süddeutsche Zeitung and the world for the period from November 1, 1966 - October 30, 1967, to complete alphabetical, decline and sorted by frequency and gives additional information on text coverage of the words in the various newspaper divisions. Ruoff (1981 ) finally represents 500,000 words of spoken German language together, alphabetically, and sorted by decreasing frequency, but always separated by parts of speech.
This small overview of Frequency dictionaries for German total is incomplete and is only to show that the organization of the vocabulary and the evaluations are not always the same. It is clear that, for example, for purposes fachsprachlich oriented teaching others vocabulary selections must be made. ( For types, manufacture and application of frequency dictionaries: Alexeev 1984, 2005. )