Jargonness

Jargonness is a piecewise mathematical function mapping the frequencies of a word's appearance in scientific and contemporary English corpora to a parameter quantifying the word's association with scientific jargon - the "jargonness" of that word. It is expressed mathematically as:

$$jargonness=\{\begin{array}{cc}log\left(\frac{f_s}{f_g}\right),& f_g>0\\ 3,& f_g=0\end{array}$$

In the above equation, $f_g$ stands for the frequency of a word's appearance in a general English-language corpus and $f_s$ stands for its frequency in a scientific corpus.

Method of use

Both the frequencies ($f_g$ and $f_s$) must be determined and then substituted in the above equation to calculate the word's jargonness. In case a word has no mention in the general English corpus, 3 is taken as its jargonness as suggested by the second part of the equation. Noticing that the logarithm in the first part of the equation is a common one (to the base 10), this simply means that the word is assumed to be a thousand times more likely to appear in a scientific text than a non-scientific one.

Examples of corpora

The corpora that have most commonly been employed to determine the frequencies mentioned above are the following:

• Professional English Research Consortium Corpus (for scientific vocabulary; 17 million words)
• British National Corpus (for common vocabulary; 97 million words)