Analysis of Stress in English Words

The majority of English words are stressed on the first syllable. This is true for many words such as city, grammar and airplane. However, since English stress can appear on any syllable, it is largely unpredictable. I analyzed 20 English words to determinine the distribution of English stress. I chose the words from four categories: fruits, nature, literature and school.

The 20 words I chose are the following:

banana
orange
apple
mango
lemon
mountain
forest
river
jungle 
volcano
poem
story
character
setting
author
student
teacher
assignment
exam
pencil

Of these 20 words, 16 have sentence-initial stress. They are orange, apple, mango, lemon, mountain, forest, river, jungle, poem, story, character, setting, author, student, teacher, and pencil.

Three words have penultimate stress. They are banana, volcano and assignment. One word has sentence-final stress. The word is exam.

From the list the distribution of stress is as follows:

syllable-initial 80%
penultimate 15%
syllable-final 5%

Of course this list is to small to determine the distibution of stress in English syllables. A larger list is needed to derive a more accurate analysis. Nevertheless, the list appears to show that syllable-initial stress is definitely the most common in English.