[Corpora-List] Request

Alon Lischinsky alischinsky at gmail.com
Fri Nov 11 11:02:11 CET 2011


Hi Saman,


> Where does "grams" in "n-grams" come from?

< Ancient Greek γράμμα (grámma, "letter; something written"), used both in Classical derivations (anagram, epigram, program) and in new coinages (telegram). The specific sense of "word consisting of N characters" is slightly post-Classical, first attested in monogram (< Latin monogrammum < Byzantine Greek μονόγραμμον), but productive in English: bigram, trigram, tetragram (~=tetragrammaton), pentagram, etc.


> How is "BP" calculated in "n-grams"?

I don't know what you mean by BP in this context

Alon



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