WordCount™ is an online application which presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. The data comes from the British National Corpus®, a collection of 100 million words culled from a wide range of written and spoken language samples.
From the WordCount website:
WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find. Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is “america ensure oil opportunity”. Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.
BRAND ranks at #5,189 in its commonality and its sequence is … performing brand suits shadow withdraw grasp
AUTOPSY ranks at #28,548 in its commonality and its sequence is … autopsy apothecary elects fissures toiletries
Go ahead … give WordCount a whirl. It’s intoxicating.