I confessed earlier my love for words. It’s not because I use them particularly well. No, I craft sentences like my 7-year-old son uses my electric drill. But that’s okay. Both of us are having a lot of fun.
If you share my love, visit WordCount. As they say:
WordCount is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.
Be boring and use WordCount to explore which words are used more often. Or see who can guess the more uncommon word. Use it to code and decode secret messages. Can you decode this?
Who knew the mark of the beast was “easy”?
For more WordCounting fun, look for meaningful phrases formed from adjacent words in the ranked list.
Give me words and I mangle sentences; give my son a drill and he mangles wood. Give the internet a tool like WordCount and what do we do with it? QueryCount tracks the word searches done using WordCount. Makes my son’s work look like a masterpiece…
Updated (5 Mar 2007, I noticed someone had visited this page): I changed one of the numbers above. The rankings had changed.
Hat tip: guff (reality on hold).