Q: Studying how often letters and pairs of letters occur in a language is referred to as _______.
or
Q: The term “linguistics” refers to the study of letter and letter pair frequencies in a language.
- frequency analysis
- codebreaking
- espionage
- cryptography
Explanation: Studying how often letters and pairs of letters occur in a language is referred to as frequency analysis. This approach is used rather often in the field of cryptography, particularly when cracking or evaluating the efficacy of substitution ciphers. In these ciphers, each letter in the plaintext is changed to a different letter. Cryptanalysts can make informed assumptions about the replacements by studying the frequency of letters or letter pairs in an encrypted communication. This allows them to make progress toward decrypting the message.
