Contribution from Greek to English vocabulary
There are two ways to quantify "type and token frequency:
- type frequency is the proportion of distinct words and is considerably higher than the token frequency. The vocabulary of an educated English speaker will be roughly 80,000 words compared to a typical English dictionary, about 5% of the words are borrowed from Greek.
- token frequency is the proportion of words in the actual texts
Words derived from Greek
aster, star: asterisk, astrology, astronomy.
bios, life: biology, biography.
ge, earth: geoplogy, geography, geometry.
graphe, writing: autograph, photograph, telegraph.
logos, speech, description: dialogue, prologue, zoology.
metron, measure: metre, meter, thermometer, barometer.
phone, voice: telephone, phonetics, symphony.
skopeo, I see: telescope, microscope, spectroscope.
