 Frequency-Brevity Principle (1958)

In his “How Shall a Thing Be Called?” article, Brown wrote about how objects have many names, but often share a common name.He proposed the frequency-brevity principle, by which he theorized that children use words that are shorter in length because shorter words are more common for objects in the English language—for example, referring to a dog as “dog” and not “animal”.He elaborated on the frequency-brevity principle and how it may be violated (for example, referring to a pineapple as “pineapple” and not “fruit”).