gram and 4-gram sentences are beginning to look a lot like Shakespeare. Indeed, a careful investigation of the 4-gram sentences shows that they look a little too much like Shakespeare. The words It cannot be but so are directly from King John. This is because, not to put the knock on Shakespeare, his oeuvre is not very large as corpora go (N = 884, 647,V = 29, 066), and our n-gram probability matrices are ridiculously sparse. There are V 2 = 844, 000, 000 possible bigrams alone, and the number of possible 4-grams is V 4 = 7 × 10 17 . Thus, once the generator has chosen the first 4-gram (It cannot be but), there are only five possible continuations (that, I, he, thou, and so); indeed, for many 4-grams, there is only one continuation.