[Corpora-List] Query about nomenclature

[Chris Brew]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 02:56:29PM -0000, John Mckenny wrote:
>
>    Dear CORPORA subscribers
>    Should it be N-gram/Ngram/n-gram/ngram? Is there a consensus about
>    which of these four to use? Is there a way to measure usage on the Web
>    via [1]www.webcorp.org.uk  or other meta-engines?
>
>    What comes after bigrams, trigrams?  Is it 4grams, 5grams etc. or
>    could it be something like quadrigrams, pentagrams, hexagrams? It was
>    pointed out to me that pentagram is a Satanist symbol.

The sequence could have been

monogram, digram, trigram, tetragram, pentagram, hexagram, ...

with fairly uniform (Greek) etymology, but someone chose

unigram,bigram,trigram,...

these look like Latin numerical prefixes, so my guess is that
the intended extrapolation is

quadrigram,quintagram,....

which replicates the mixed Latin/Greek etymology of bigram through
the series. Pretty yukky...

Chris