report.rmd

---
title: "English Word lengths"
author: "Jenny Bryan"
date: "`r format(Sys.time(), '%d %B, %Y')`"
output:
  html_document:
    keep_md: yes
---

```{r load-hist-dat, include = FALSE}
hist_dat <- read.delim("histogram.tsv")
```

On most *nix systems, the file `/usr/share/dict/words` contains a bunch of words. On my machine, it contains `r sum(hist_dat$Freq)` words.

I computed the length of each word, i.e. the number of characters, and tabulated how many words consist of 1 character, 2 characters, etc.

The most frequent word length is `r with(hist_dat, Length[which.max(Freq)])`.

Here is a histogram of word lengths.

![*Fig. 1* A histogram of English word lengths](histogram.png)