# Word Familiarity and Frequency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.03431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03431/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Personalized Jargon Identification for Enhanced Interdisciplinary Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09481/) (2023)
- [Beyond Film Subtitles: Is YouTube the Best Approximation of Spoken Vocabulary?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03240/) (2024)
- [A modified model for topic detection from a corpus and a new metric evaluating the understandability of topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04941/) (2023)
- [The Impact of Familiarity on Naming Variation: A Study on Object Naming in Mandarin Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10181/) (2023)
- [Explain Less, Understand More: Data-Efficient Personalization of Reader-Dependent Jargons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16227/) (2025)
- [Corpus Prevalence of Multiple-Choice Question Options](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17377/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Word frequency is assumed to correlate with word familiarity, but the strength of this correlation has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we report on our analysis of the correlation between a word familiarity rating list obtained through a psycholinguistic experiment and the log-frequency obtained from various corpora of different kinds and sizes (up to the terabyte scale) for English and Japanese. Major findings are threefold: First, for a given corpus, familiarity is necessary for a word to achieve high frequency, but familiar words are not necessarily frequent. Second, correlation increases with the corpus data size. Third, a corpus of spoken language correlates better than one of written language. These findings suggest that cognitive familiarity ratings are correlated to frequency, but more highly to that of spoken rather than written language.