Word Frequency

A measure of how often a word occurs in a given language or text corpus. High-frequency words like common function words are encountered regularly and recognized quickly, while low-frequency words are rarer and require more cognitive effort to process. Word frequency significantly affects reading accessibility: people with dyslexia spend longer fixating on low-frequency words and find them more difficult to decode. In text simplification, word frequency is used as a proxy for word complexity — replacing infrequent words with more common synonyms can make text easier to read for people with dyslexia, second-language learners, and people with cognitive disabilities.