The oddities of the bigram "ed"

[eggyk]

But I must insist that statistics of characters and digraphs are bound to be more confusing than illuminating.  Their frequencies are mostly determined by whether they occur in the most common words; and these in turn may be highly dependent on the topic.

For example, the digraph "rb" may be significantly more common in a Latin herbal text than in an astronomical text, because it occurs in the word "herba".  

The digraph "ed" may be more frequent in an English chronicle than in an English herbal, because of its occurrence in verbs inflected in the past tense.

And the "th" digraph may be less common at the beginning of a line in any English text, because its frequency there is determined by the occurrence of the common words that begin with it: "the", "this", "that", "then", "they", "them", "there", "thus", etc -- but those common words are relatively short, and when text is formatted into paragraphs the first word of each line tends to be longer than average, while short words are more likely to fit at the end of each line.  

All the best, --stolfi

Yes, but in this graph its not the matter of relative frequency alone, but rather that there are many pages with 0 instances. This is highly unusual for what seems to be a very common bigram elsewhere in the text.  

Although, your "rb" example is interesting. Perhaps it would be worthwhile looking at "conditionally common" bigrams found within other manuscripts, using a similar analysis done in this post. I would imagine such bigrams would largely be consonant pairs.