Answers to the design task

Here are some possible answers to the design task in Step 2.6:

• bleat: a sound recording of the noise the word describes.
• charabanc: an indication that the word is old-fashioned.
• discreet: a note comparing ‘discreet’ (careful not to attract attention) and ‘discrete’ (separate and distinct). These two words are commonly confused.
• pelvis: a picture to show this part of the skeleton.
• tort: an indication that this is a legal term.
• sidewalk: information about geographical restrictions: this is American, not British usage.
• skinny: an indication that this word has a negative connotation.
• utterly: an indication that this word often occurs in negative contexts.

Look up these words in a dictionary of your choice. Does it provide all the additional information for these words?

For examples of usage labels in dictionaries, see:

• Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, Guide to Symbols and Labels – Symbols used in our dictionaries web page.
• Merriam-Webster, Help guide on Usage Labels web page.

For more about word frequency, see

• Sketch Engine – English word lists
• Macmillan Dictionary – Red Words and Stars

Word prevalence

You might also want to consider whether a word is ‘prevalent’, or in other words whether it is known by a lot of people.

Look at the website http://crr.ugent.be/archives/2045. The spreadsheet, downloadable from this site, gives word prevalence scores for 62,000 English lemmas. The scores are as follows:

• Negative prevalence: words known by less than 50% of the people
• Prevalence = 0.0: 50% of the people know this word
• Prevalence = 1.0: 84% of the people know the word
• Prevalence = 1.5: 93% of the people know the word
• Prevalence = 2.0: 98% of the people know the word
• Prevalence = 2.5: nearly everyone knows the word

You can find out more about word prevalence by reading Brysbaert et al (2018) below.

Further reading

_{Brysbaert, M., Mandera, P., McCormick, S.F., and Keuleers, E. (2018) ‘Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas’. Behavior Research Methods [online] 1-13. available from http://crr.ugent.be/archives/2045 [5 November 2019]}