From the paper you cited: > In our analysis we treat words with equivalent meanings but with different spellings (e.g. color versus colour) as distinct words..

From the paper you cited: > In our analysis we treat words with equivalent meanings but with different spellings (e.g. color versus colour) as distinct words... I think it's a bit of a stretch to use that to say that English lexicon is shrinking. The number of different spellings for the same words is, yes, but that's not necessarily bad. Other articles suggest that English vocabulary is still steadily growing: https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/feb/04/english-neologisms-new-words https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/fe... I think you made good points regarding QuickType though.