March 27, 2006, 13:42
<wordnerd>Wordcount site
You might enjoy the
http://www.wordcount.org/main.php site, where 86,000+ English words are listed in order of their frequency of appearance. What is as easy as
pie, rarer than
rubies, common as
daisies? It's all here.
According to the site, "
WordCount data currently comes [sic] from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection ... designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®."
The skeptic in me has doubts, though. I've got to believe that there are well more than 86,000 words that "occur at least twice". (Particularly since common nouns and verbs are be double- and quadruple-counted, in their various forms:
house and
houses, for example, and
start, started, starts, and
starting.) And do you seriously expect me to believe that
verkehrsberuhigun is substantially more common than
idiocies, or similar anomolies?
Nontheless, it's good fun.