Each of the nine words in the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is written on a separate piece of paper. These nine pieces of paper are kept in a box. One of the pieces is drawn at random from the box. The *expected length* of the word drawn is _________. (The answer should be rounded to one decimal place.)

List the lengths of each of the 9 words in the sentence:

1. "The" $\rightarrow 3$

2. "quick" $\rightarrow 5$

3. "brown" $\rightarrow 5$

4. "fox" $\rightarrow 3$

5. "jumps" $\rightarrow 5$

6. "over" $\rightarrow 4$

7. "the" $\rightarrow 3$

8. "lazy" $\rightarrow 4$

9. "dog" $\rightarrow 3$

Since each of the 9 pieces of paper has an equal probability of $\frac{1}{9}$ being drawn, the expected length $E[L]$ is the arithmetic mean of the word lengths:

Rounding to one decimal place gives 3.9 (accepted range: 3.8 to 3.9).