Hi everyone! For my fellow college-goers, I hope the semester is going well! If you need a distraction from the stress of finals being around the corner (or are bored for some reason) this website is your answer: http://www.wordcount.org/main.php Make sure you really have time to waste, I was on this site for longer than I intended to be! Word junkies beware.

The “WordCount” site presents an interactive list of the 86,800 most frequently used English words. Isn’t that awesome! Be sure to leave me a comment if you find anything interesting! Sometimes I find myself saying a certain word multiple times in one day. Now if I felt like it I could visit this site and see if it actually is a high frequency word.  The rankings compare the words to the other words in the list. For example, Disney is word 10,817 on the list meaning that it is used less frequently than word 10,816 and more frequently than word 10,818.

I’m sorry to say that “Facebook” and “Google” have not yet made their way into the archive.  The compilation process doesn’t include word frequencies from the internet.

One trend I noticed while browsing is that lexically ambiguous words are ranked with a high frequency (low numbers on the scale).  This makes total sense because these words are used in multiple contexts, and therefore more often than a word with only one meaning.  For example, date is word 599. This could mean a date on the calendar, a night out, the person you’re going out with, or even a type of food.  On the other hand, the word camera is ranked 3426. It really only has one meaning.

Since the site is interactive you can search the archive list by either word or rank. Try it out and if you notice any trends in the word frequencies, feel free to share them! I’d love to hear what you find!