What is it about?
The article assesses different measures of word commonness and explore how each measure performs on a selection of occurrence distributions of Norwegian compound words. This procedure elucidates the strenghts and weaknesses of the measures in question, and shows for example that the predictive accuracy of frequency measures is low when the word distribution is uneven.
Why is it important?
The article is written with a lexicographical context in mind. Many lexicographical projects would benefit from being able to tell which word are more common than others, as this will help them identify a reasonable selection of words to include and exclude. The assessment of word commoness does however have many other applications. For example whenever words feature as stimulus in a psycholinguistic experiment, the underlying commonness of a given word will influence e.g. the reaction time of the respondents encountering that word. Further, when assessing the readability of a text, word commonness plays a role.