Why use relative frequencies?
Relative frequencies are based on occurrences of a given word per 10,000 words. For instance, in the case of the Greek verb pempô, Plutarch uses this verb 146 times, which is unimpressive compared with Xenophon’s maximum of 350 times. Yet, the corpus of Plutarch on-line in Perseus is about 107,000 words compared with Xenophon’s 312,000. So, the relative frequency in Plutarch is 13.67 at its maximum, compared with Xenophon’s maximum of 11.21. When making comparisons between authors, it is most useful to know the relative frequency for a given word rather than the word count itself, since the size of the corpora vary.
