  We study the frequency distributions and correlations of the word lengths of
ten European languages. Our findings indicate that a) the word-length
distribution of short words quantified by the mean value and the entropy
distinguishes the Uralic (Finnish) corpus from the others, b) the tails at long
words, manifested in the high-order moments of the distributions, differentiate
the Germanic languages (except for English) from the Romanic languages and
Greek and c) the correlations between nearby word lengths measured by the
comparison of the real entropies with those of the shuffled texts are found to
be smaller in the case of Germanic and Finnish languages.
