Standard Deviation

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Standard deviation is “a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its mean.”. It’s a useful measure from statistics, and std in the math.statistics vocabulary included with Factor.

I bumped into this – um, are they still called tweets? – today:

Word with the lowest standard deviation of letter position in the alphabet, for each length pic.twitter.com/caHYDDpyBx
— Adam Aaronson (@aaaronson) February 4, 2026

Of course, I wondered how that looks for the /usr/share/dict/words on my computer:

IN: scratchpad "/usr/share/dict/words" utf8 file-lines
               [ length ] collect-by
               [ [ std ] minimum-by ] assoc-map
               sort-keys values
               [ dup std "%s: %s\n" printf ] each
A: 0.0
aa: 0.0
aba: 0.5773502691896257
baba: 0.5773502691896257
abaca: 0.8944271909999159
bacaba: 0.816496580927726
deedeed: 0.5345224838248488
poroporo: 1.3093073414159542
susurrous: 1.9364916731037085
beefheaded: 1.9578900207451218
cabbagehead: 2.46429041972071
fiddledeedee: 2.424621182533032
promonopolist: 2.911075226502911
monogonoporous: 3.1830595551871363
prophototropism: 3.5023801430836525
philophilosophos: 3.855731664245668
sulphophosphorous: 4.227013964824759
chemicoengineering: 4.556472090169843
plutonometamorphism: 5.220293285659733
encephalomeningocele: 4.871776937249466
philosophicoreligious: 5.014740177478695
philosophicohistorical: 5.485320828241917
philosophicotheological: 5.2090678006509625
scientificophilosophical: 5.538894097749744
antidisestablishmentarianism: 6.7081053397123425

Interesting, both similar and different. Well, it’s pretty close and also pretty obvious we are using slightly different dictionaries. I’m not sure what deedeed or poroporo mean and they aren’t in the SCRABBLE Players Dictionary.

Anyway, fun!