An n-gram is a continuous sequence of n items - words, letters or symbols - from text or speech, used to analyze patterns and predict sequences in language.
Suppose we choose the items of our n-gram as "words". We then have the following taxonomy:
- unigram - consisting of a single word e.g. design
- bigram - consisting of two words e.g. design experiments
- trigram - e.g. design of experiments
Google has a great ngram viewer to see the frequency of certain ngrams in books throughout the ages.
