A second way of checking the validity of the lists is to look at the total number of types
in each list. Low frequency words tend to have less family members than high frequency
words, so even though the number of families in each list is the same, one thousand, the
number of types should be less. Table 4 contains this data.
Table 4: The number of types (family members) in each of the twenty-five 1000 word
family lists
1 6857
2 6374
3 5880
4 4863
5 4294
6 4104
7 3679
8 3417
9 3196
10 2985
11 2941
12 2754
13 2415
14 2299
15 2283
16 2086
17 2076
18 1933
19 1872
20 1820
21 1651
22 1539
23 1394
24 1296
25 1675
The 1st 1000 word families contains 6,857 word types, an average of 6.857 per family as
each list contains exactly 1000 word families. There is decrease in word types from one
list to the next. The families in the newly created 25th 1000, which was made from a
dictionary, may have been more diligently made than the preceding lists.A third way of checking the validity of the lists is to make sure that no wide range, high
or mid-frequency words are missing from the lists. To check this, the lists were run over a
wide range of different corpora, existing lists, and texts. No frequent, wide range word
families were missing.