It has been hypothesized that early stages of language have left traces of simpler forms of language, for instance, in child language (Bickerton, 1990; Jackendoff, 1999). Word learning biases in children (Saxton, 2010) suggest constraints that human language had to meet at its very origin. Here a candidate for a new (to the best of our knowledge) learning bias is investigated: a global preference for words with a small number of meanings unraveled by the analysis of massive electronic corpora in English and Dutch…