How to play CorpusForge
You are a corpus linguist setting the tile bag for a new word game. Every round gives you one language’s units — its letters, its graphemes, or its words — and how often each really turns up in ordinary text. Your job: give the rare ones the points they deserve.
- Pick up a tile. Tap a tile in the tray. (On a keyboard, focus it and press Enter.)
- Drop it in a band. Tap one of the four bands — Common (1 pt), Uncommon (2), Rare (4), Very rare (8). The commonest units go in Common; the rarest go in Very rare.
- Check the bag. When all eight tiles are placed, press Check the bag. Any tile still in the wrong band gets a gentle “?” — move it and check again. There’s no timer and nothing to lose.
- Read the lesson. Set a fair bag and the round reveals what it taught — Zipf’s law, why a tile isn’t a byte, or why rare words are learned late.
Why frequency = points
In every language a few units do most of the work (that’s Zipf’s law), so a fair game makes the rare units worth more — that’s why Q and Z score high and E scores 1. Setting points from real frequencies is exactly what the designers of every tile game had to do. The bag you build here is the same kind of data our other word games run on.