In the context of wondering how to convert characters per minute to words per minute, it was pointed out that CODEX and PARIS are used as typical words for measuring speed of CW operators.
As the wikipedia states:
There are two common typical words: "PARIS" and "CODEX".
PARIS mimics a word rate that is typical of natural language words and reflects the benefits of Morse code's shorter code durations for common characters such as "e" and "t".
CODEX offers a word rate that is typical of 5-letter code groups (sequences of random letters). Using the word PARIS as a standard, the number of dot units is 50 and a simple calculation shows that the dot length at 20 words per minute is 60 milliseconds. Using the word CODEX with 60 dot units, the dot length at 20 words per minute is 50 milliseconds.
I'll argue that neither PARIS nor CODEX are themselves typical in morse communication. The assumed typical length of five letters seems, at least for English, unfounded, too:
Even if we assume that a keyer would omit articles like "the" and "a" regularly, prepositions ("on", "at", "by", "for"…) should be rather common and are much shorter. Longer words tend to get abbreviated.
So, since the wikipedia doesn't actually cite its sources:
- Who (and: when) decided CODEX and PARIS would be appropriate for words-per-minute estimates?
and
- Are there statistics to back this up?