From time to time I find myself wishing to calculate basic statistics on words in the English language. For example, today I found myself wanting a graph of the number of English words vs. their length.


Admittedly, such queries usually arise for me in the context of conversational/recreational purposes, but with the obvious links to cryptography, computational game theory (Scrabble AI etc), and statistics, I think the following question easily falls within the purview of mathematical research. 


**What good quality resources exist for performing statistical/structural analysis on the set of English words?**


One answer to this would be "get a decent word list and write an appropriate program", but, firstly, I don't know what the best word list is and where to get it , and, secondly, in a post-Wolfram Alpha world, I am compelled to search for something higher level, that I can consult from time to time with little set-up needed. For example Mathematica seems to have an elaborate "WordData" package, though I am somewhat unsure of how exhaustive the data set is, given the following excerpt from the Wolfram site:


"Total number of words and phrases in WordData:
In[1]:= Length[WordData[All]]
Out[1]= 149191"


If anyone has first-hand experience with this package, or even better (as a Maple user), a similar or better resource that is standalone, (or implemented in Maple), then it would be great to hear about it.



Good quality data/packages for statistical/structure analysis of words in the English language
I am very sure this kind ofn things is done in the free (free as in freedom, not as in beer!)
statistical language R. .. See www.r-project.org, and then repeat your question on 
the r-help mailing list, where you are sure to get informed answers about how to do it in R. 
That it can be done tere, and is done there, is a certainty.


( as for the meta-discussion where this belongs, it belongs on mathoverflow! Statistics is math, not programming.)


