Enimlevinud

Enimlevinud is a term used in linguistics and data analysis to denote the most frequently occurring item within a data collection, such as a word form, a category, or a data record. It is formed from Estonian words enim (most) and levinud (prevalent). In practice, enimlevinud refers to the single element with the highest frequency when data are tallied, and it is commonly identified in corpus studies, survey analysis, and database reporting. The concept is descriptive rather than normative; it does not imply any quality judgement about the item, only that it appears most often in the sample.

Calculation and methods: to determine enimlevinud, researchers count occurrences of each item, handle ties by predefined rules (e.g., selecting all tied items or choosing among them by secondary criteria), and report the result with the frequency and relative share. The measure can be applied to textual data (most common word, lemma, or part of speech), categorical attributes (most frequent category), or numerical bins (most represented range).

Applications and limitations: Used in exploratory data analysis, feature engineering for natural language processing, and quality checks in data pipelines. Limitations include dependency on sample size, sampling bias, corpus composition, and preprocessing decisions (tokenization, normalisation). As with any frequency-based summary, enimlevinud reflects the data slice rather than an intrinsic property, and results may vary with different datasets or over time.