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.¹ It is expressed mathematically as:²

$${\displaystyle jargonness={\begin{cases}log\left({\frac {f_{s}}{f_{g}}}\right),&f_{g}>0\\3,&f_{g}=0\end{cases}}}$$

In the above equation, ${\displaystyle f_{g}}$ stands for the frequency of a word's appearance in a general English-language corpus, ${\displaystyle f_{s}}$ stands for its frequency in a scientific corpus, and ${\displaystyle log}$ is the common (base-10) logarithm.³

Both the frequencies (${\displaystyle f_{g}}$ and ${\displaystyle f_{s}}$) 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.² 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.

The corpora that have most commonly been employed to determine the frequencies mentioned above are the following:²

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