The Small World of English

The Small World of English Building a word game forced us to solve a measurement problem: how do you rank 40+ ways to associate any given word down to exactly 17 playable choices? We discovered that combining human-curated thesauri, book cataloging systems, and carefully constrained LLM queries creates a navigable network where 76% of random word pairs connect in ≤7 hops—but only when you deprecate superconnectors and balance multiple ranking signals. The resulting network of 1.5 million English terms reveals that nearly any two common words connect in 6-7 hops through chains of meaningful associations. The mean path length of 6.43 hops held true across a million random word pairs—shorter than we’d guessed, and remarkably stable. 1.5M Headwords 100M Relationships <7 Degrees of Separation for 76% of words This is consistent with the small-world structure and near-universal connectivity seen in lexical network research on smaller datasets.1,2 The network’s structure makes intuitive s ... Read full article.