When Large Skips or Short ELS's are Significant

It is a common first reaction to question the significance of any ELS meetings as soon as one understands the ground rules: any skip distance is acceptable; and various table widths can be tried in order to find a closer meeting between ELS's.

But these rules are part and parcel of the mathematical calculations. In addition, the same ground rules are used for the Torah and for all the comparison texts, and the significant results occur repeatedly only in the Torah.

Large skip distances do increase the chance of finding ELS's, in any text. But the length of the ELS and the rarity of its letters are also critical. With simple calculations of letter frequencies, one can easily show that for 8-letter words, a skip of 1000 is usually impressive. For 10-letter words, a skip of 10,000 is impressive. For even longer words, finding the ELS at all can be highly significant.

On the other hand, ELS's for words with common and few letters can also be very significant, if for example it is an experiment with very few choices in a pre-chosen confined area of Torah, and/or we have many such small words forming a significant cluster.

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