What is "n-gram"

n. (context linguistics English) a contiguous sequence of ''n'' items from a given sequence of text or speech

In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus. When the items are words, -grams may also be called shingles.

An n-gram of size 1 is referred to as a "unigram"; size 2 is a " bigram" (or, less commonly, a "digram"); size 3 is a " trigram". Larger sizes are sometimes referred to by the value of n, e.g., "four-gram", "five-gram", and so on.