Friday, February 23, 2007

The conquistador

It's hard to say what's so amazing about the site, but I've wasted enough time there to know that something about Wordcount makes pain go away. The site lines up a list of 86,800 words in order of their frequency. They are also sized in a corresponding scale. According to the "about" page the data was compiled from the 100 million word British National Corpus®.

I found the link over on Hosstuff (to which I've added a link in my sidebar).

5 comments:

  1. Now, if only there was a Spanish version! :)

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  2. "His" is 27; "Her" is 36... and Gretchen tells me there are more women than there are men. I'm detecting an injustice here.

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  3. Yay!
    'Multilingualism' is ranked 86795th, well below some other words in this list that don't even exist (like 'didn' 71850, or 'cbhps' 78213)!
    Tells you something about anglophones, don't it?

    (Thanks for the plug!)

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  4. Yes I have a hard time believing that "overpoweringly" (83118) is so much less frequent than "scu" (58061) and "cholecystokinin" (41632).

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  5. Michael--didn't you know that "cholecystokinin" is the technical word for "pancake batter?" Yep--cooks use it all the time.

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