A semantics exercise

How do you
mean?

When someone says it'll be done soon, how soon is that exactly? When something happens occasionally, how often do you picture it? Fuzzy words are everywhere — but we don't all picture the same thing.

17 responses and counting

Curious?

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Interested in the data?

See running averages and distributions for every word — and how responses shift across demographics.

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The origin

"Analysts often use words like 'probably' or 'unlikely' — but readers interpret them very differently."

Inspired by a decades-old CIA study on linguistic probability. Sherman Kent found that when analysts wrote "probable," readers assigned wildly different numerical odds to that single word.

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