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Why everyone agrees which blob is 'bouba' and which is 'kiki'
Show people a soft blob and a spiky star and ask which one is bouba and which is kiki. The words are made up, yet in the classic version of the test about 95%…
Why the most common words are the shortest: Zipf's two laws of language
Count the words in almost any long text and a strange pattern appears: the most common word turns up about twice as often as the second, three times as often…
Why English spelling doesn't match how words sound
Around 1400, English spelling roughly matched speech. Bite sounded close to "beet", meet roughly like "mate", and house like "hoose". Then, over about three…