# Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes word length in political speeches from the USA and UK over 200 years and finds that word length distribution has not significantly changed over time.

## Contribution

The study shows that word length in political speeches follows a lognormal distribution and has remained stable over two centuries.

## Key findings

- Word length in political speeches is best described by a lognormal distribution.
- The average word length has not significantly changed over the past 200 years.
- Word length distribution does not follow Zipf's principle of least effort.

## Abstract

In this paper, word length in the texts of public speeches by USA and UK politicians is analyzed. More than 300 speeches delivered over the past two hundred years were studied. It is found that the lognormal distribution better describes the distribution of word length than do the Weibull and Poisson distributions, for example. It is shown that the length of words does not change significantly over time (the average value either does not change or slightly decreases, and the mode slightly increases). These results are fundamentally different from those obtained previously for sentence lengths and indicate that, in terms of quantitative linguistic analysis, the word length in politicians’ speech has not evolved over the last 200 years and does not obey the principle of least effort proposed by G. Zipf.