WordCount Tracks Word Popularity

Posted on May 26, 2005

WordCount presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Not surprisingly, the most common word is "The." You can search the database to find the word rank of a specific word. For example, a search for "book" tells you that it is the 357th most common word and a search for "Writing" tells you that is the 862nd most common word. WordCount says its data comes from the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC.

You can find WordCount here.