Monday, August 09, 2004

Ranking words

www.wordcount.org
This is kind of neat, and will be a boon for answering those pesky questions that we all know and dread, e.g. "what is the rank, in terms of frequency of usage in the English language, of the word 'libraries'?" (answer: 4061, of an archive containing 86800), or, what is the 23,923th most common word in English (answer: photon). Regrettably, many of the words that people might be expected to ask about, like lambent, rhodomontade and balanoid, are not yet included in the word count database.