Of the four primary approaches to processing language by computer, only the parsing approach considers the semantic and syntactic components from the start. In doing so, however, the required resources expand rapidly as the scope of the language processed increases. And as that scope increases, the performance of parsing systems decreases. A natural language processor uses a tumbling-frequency phrase chain parser as described herein which circumvents this resource-intensive step in parsing, while quickly and almost effortlessly arriving at the next step in natural-language processing with far more accurate results involving a partitioning dictionary and phrase chains.