What is the term for the number of times a word appears in a text?

What is the term for the number of times a word appears in a text?

• A. Frequency
• B. Density
• C. Prevalence
• D. Incidence

Answer: (A)

This question centers on how often a word shows up in a text. The term for that measure is frequency. It is literally the count of occurrences of the word. You can also talk about relative frequency, which is that count divided by the total number of words, giving a share or percentage for easy comparison across texts of different lengths. For example, if a text has 2,000 words and the word appears 150 times, the frequency is 150 and the relative frequency is 150/2000 = 0.075 (7.5%). Density would refer to how concentrated or rich a text is with content words or other measures of concentration, not the simple occurrence count of a single word. Prevalence describes how widespread something is across a larger set, like across documents, not the exact count within one text. Incidence is often used to describe the rate of new cases or events in a population over time, not word counts. So the best term for the number of times a word appears is frequency.

This question centers on how often a word shows up in a text. The term for that measure is frequency. It is literally the count of occurrences of the word. You can also talk about relative frequency, which is that count divided by the total number of words, giving a share or percentage for easy comparison across texts of different lengths. For example, if a text has 2,000 words and the word appears 150 times, the frequency is 150 and the relative frequency is 150/2000 = 0.075 (7.5%).

Density would refer to how concentrated or rich a text is with content words or other measures of concentration, not the simple occurrence count of a single word. Prevalence describes how widespread something is across a larger set, like across documents, not the exact count within one text. Incidence is often used to describe the rate of new cases or events in a population over time, not word counts. So the best term for the number of times a word appears is frequency.