# Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language

## TL;DR

This study examines the relationship between word frequency, polysemy, and length across multiple languages, confirming that more frequent words tend to be more polysemous and shorter in various measures.

## Contribution

It extends previous research by analyzing multiple languages and additional length measures, reinforcing the universality of Zipfian laws in language.

## Key findings

- Meaning-frequency law holds across languages
- Shorter words tend to be more frequent in all measures
- Laws are robust across English, Dutch, and Spanish

## Abstract

The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages.