Average word length dynamics as indicator of cultural changes in society

Understand

Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article.

• Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied.
• It was found out that average word length slightly increased in the 19th century, and then it was growing rapidly most of the 20th century and started decreasing over the period from the end of the 20th - to the beginning of the 21th century.
• Words which contributed mostly to increase or decrease of word average length were identified.