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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, 2014 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, 2014 at 14:54
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    Related, but not exactly what you want, see the answers to this question
    – Patrick M
    Apr 3, 2014 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..
    – arkon
    Jun 6, 2018 at 3:32

4 Answers 4

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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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    However, such corpora are compiled almost always from printed texts, and hence do not represent "the English language", which is spoken and poorly represented in writing, let alone printing. Such sources will give you numbers that are decades (or centuries, in some cases) out of date and frequency.
    – John Lawler
    Jul 11, 2021 at 13:44
  • None of these give word frequencies. They give only counts. This is not as informative as giving the frequencies would be, because none of them say how many words were in the sample used to produce these counts.
    – Phil Goetz
    Nov 21, 2022 at 4:38
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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 Hasn't Forgotten Monica
    Oct 26, 2018 at 2:26
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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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  • Also consider using Google Scholar, depending on the type of results you may be interested in. I do that often when writing, is also provides information on the actual context and "quality" of the sources.
    – Peruz
    Feb 1, 2020 at 6:09
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Up-goer 6 is an online prototype text editor that color-codes words by frequency, and if you click on the word, it'll tell you the frequency more exactly.

https://splasho.com/upgoer6/

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