Figure 6.

Frequency histogram of word length from the rank-ordered-by-frequency list of the British National Corpus (as in figure 4); shaded area is word length of homophones within the BNC sample. The BNC list includes all words down to a frequency of 10 per million, yielding n = 7726 words. Removing abbreviations, proper nouns, names and special characters leaves n = 6956 words. Mean length BNC = 6.93 ± 0.029 (s.e.m), or 7.08 ± 0.03 excluding homophones; mean length of homophones = 4.56 ± 0.041 (s.e.m.), n = 441 pairs and triples or 991 words total, p < 0.0001. Homophones taken from http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/bifroest/misc/homophones-list.html; a comparison sample of homophones is made available at http://www.teachingtreasures.com.au/teaching-tools/Basic-worksheets/worksheets-english/upper/homophones-list.htm: mean homophone length = 4.77 ± 0.045, n = 427 pairs.