On the occurrence of reversible words

William Paul Livant and John Paul Boyd

American Documentation, 1963, vol. 14, issue 3, 234-237

Abstract: We consider the population of trigrams in printed English of the form consonant1‐vowel‐consonant2. It is shown that, if a trigram C1VC2 is an English word, then its symmetric permutation, C2VC1, is likely to be an English word more often than expected on the basis of the ratio of all words to all trigrams. It was conjectured that the set of trigram words tends to be closed under the formation of mirror images; i.e., the permutation of the consonants of one trigram word yields another trigram word rather than nonsense. But it is shown that the number of symmetric combinations (C1VC2: C2VC1), both of which are words, can be predicted from 1) the relative frequencies of letters in all trigram words and 2) the particular frequency distributions of consonants in C1 and C2.

Date: 1963
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