Monday, September 17, 2012

Discrete Text Wear

A student's cell phone (thanks Jason) showing the discrete distribution of texting wear. Not many uses of wxyz (9), much more of ghi (4) and mno (6) most likely from Jason's two thumbs resting on these keys during texting. Are the remaining letter sets (numbers) equally likely?

Texting has its own unique spelling and distribution of letter usage. I have been unable to find any published distribution of letter frequencies for texting. Are there any? If they were the same as standard English, the letter sets would have the following frequencies of use:
  • abc    12.439
  • def     19.243
  • ghi     15.089
  • jkl        4.925
  • mno   16.773
  • pqrs   14.347
  • tuv     12.851
  • wxyz    4.66
Of course relative to these percentages, resting thumbs have caused over amounts of wear on ghi (4) and mno (6). The wear also shows over amounts on jkl (5) as well. The others are all very similar as are the wear patterns, except for wxyz (9) that shows the small amount of wear suggested by the 4.66% frequency of use.

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