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Is there a website that will give me a frequency of a word in the English language? I am looking for some thing like this: I would type in the word, and it would give me a frequency rating.

I have seen one before that had something like 80,000 words, but I just can't seem to find it anymore.

Update: I think the problem with these frequency lists is that they are not accurate enough, because some words are also used as Proper Nouns, and that skews the numbers. For example, the word "bracken" is rarely used in its original meaning "fern", but it is frequently used as a last name. If you take that into consideration, then you can see a more accurate number.

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    Have you tried Google Ngram viewer: books.google.com/ngrams ? – Ronan Apr 3 '14 at 14:35
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    The 0.00000..% is the frequency; "the" gives 5%, and "to" gives 2.5%. Since these are the two of the most common words in English, that seems around right. – Peter Shor Apr 3 '14 at 14:54
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    Related, but not exactly what you want, see the answers to this question – Patrick M Apr 3 '14 at 15:26
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    Just a heads up, Ngram only checks books between 1500 and 2008. So it wont necessarily reflect the most modern usage with extreme accuracy, especially where newly-coined terms are concerned. And it's not entirely accurate in the first place, due in part to blind spots in optical character recognition. An article on Wired explains several pitfalls with Ngram.. – b1nary.atr0phy Jun 6 '18 at 3:32
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The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) have frequencies for all words rather than just 80000. And they are professionally compiled and regularly updated corpora, rather than something for which you don't even know the source or date.

If you are looking for lists of words sorted by frequency, COCA has that, too. They have a free 5000-word frequency list, and a 100000-word frequency list that's available for a fee, and some lists in-between.

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What you are looking for is the wonderful site wordcount.org. Enjoy.

About Wordcount Wordcount is a visualization of the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words [...]

Wordcount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, 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®. In the future, Wordcount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

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    I have no idea why this answer was downvoted, and anonymously too. – Mari-Lou A Apr 12 '14 at 18:20
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    Just wanted to point out that the website is Flash only, I could't even pass the home page. The Flash plugin is disabled on Safari because it hugs the CPU on my Mac and could't open it on my mobile device either. – rraallvv Jul 15 '17 at 12:08
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This is irrelevant to the question, but it's a simple and useful tool.Type the word or phrase you are interested in google's search box with quotes.

For example, "duplicity".

The number of search results which are displayed below the search bar is a nice indication of the frequency of the particular word in web.

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I put this together a json file derived from google's N-gram corpus. Raw data for is here:

http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html

Data has been ascii-ized, cases were merged and the number is the word count:. These are 58600 of the most frequent words with a cutoff of 1553 mentions in the corpus. (The original purpose was search query normalization)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/earonesty/dotfiles/master/frequent.js

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  • Hi Erik. Could you explain what your answer means in language that a non-IT person (like myself) can understand? Does one of your links provide a solution to the original question (and if yes, which one)? Does the .js file (is that the same as a "json file"?) need specific software to open? You can edit your post to provide more detail. – Chappo Oct 26 '18 at 2:26

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