Food for Thought: Word Predictability

09 Nov 2022

Keywords: Interesting, Random

This is an idea that’s been swirling for probably over an year now. Certain words seem to be extremely linked to other words. In other words, a word will almost always be preceeded by a word or a group of words before it. Now, this is not the obvious cases like using “of” in the blank after “States” in “United States __”; this is more the cases of using almost always using “water” after “bread” but not using vice versa.

Think of it as a fill-in-the blank challenge. Given some word or sets of word, what word will follow. Here are a few examples below.

“Give me some bread and ____.”

“I just need to put on my suit and ____.”

“That sweet and ____ taste is amazing.”

“Who are you guys, Adam and ____?”

Those were pretty simple right? It wasn’t like you’ve memorized these pairs.

But you have learned them. In fact, this actually has a special name of being a collocation. Collocations are words that are commonly said in one way and not reversed. You wouldn’t say “cons and pros” or “butter and bread”, now would you?

However, collocations are only one type of such word association where one or two words can effectively predict the next word. Another example would be the blank in “____ your bets” being “hedge”. Those aren’t necessary groups of words, as “protect”, “safeguard”, and “derisk” all would work, but basically work the same as collocation pairs.

The main point of showing these examples is to demonstrate that we actually don’t think about what we are going to say in terms of singular words but instead in terms of concepts/ideas/blocks. Beyond proper nouns, a simple proof of this is that we (well, most of us) can’t understand why we need the word “the”, instead of something like “a”, in the phrase “In the interest of time”, but naturally say the phrase.

Predicting one word in a sentence from what has already is a miracle and a super interesting task that we do on a daily basis. Here are a few more to enjoy :)

“Oh for ____’s sake, do the dishes!”

“If ____ permits, we can show a demo at the end.”

“That moment absolutely crushed my ____ in humanity.”