Word frequency data

This site contains what is probably the most accurate word frequency data for English, and is based mainly on the 520 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The data comes in a number of different formats (see samples: 100,000 and 60,000 word lists, and a comparison of the two lists).

For the 5,000-60,000 word lists, you can download a simple word list, frequency by genre, or as an eBook or a printed frequency dictionary. For the 100,000 word list, you can see detailed frequency information for many genres in several different corpora. In addition to word frequency data, you can also download up to 155 million n-grams, and 4.3 million collocates.

Any frequency list is only as good as the corpus (collection of texts) that it is based on. The 5,000-60,000 word lists are based on the only large, genre-balanced, up-to-date corpus of American English -- the 520 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The 100,000 word list supplements this COCA data with detailed frequency data from the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English, the British National Corpus, and the Corpus of American Soap Operas (for very informal language).

Short samples (see more)

rank	lemma / word	PoS	frequency	dispersion
7309	attic	n	2711	0.91
17311	tearful	j	542	0.93
27303	tailgate	v	198	0.85
37310	hydraulically	r	78	0.83
47309	unsparing	j	35	0.83
57309	embryogenesis	n	22	0.66

 

rank	lemma / word	PoS	disp	totFreq	spok	fic	mag	news	acad	M1	M2	N1	N2	A1	A2
25083	piglet	n	0.88	239	20	97	54	46	22	10	2	3	3	0	2
25088	woodsman	n	0.70	300	10	176	77	12	25	1	2	1	3	2	0
25090	candied	j	0.87	242	17	49	102	73	1	0	1	2	1	0	0
25093	metacognitive	j	0.69	306	0	0	0	0	306	0	0	0	0	0	0
25107	industry-wide	j	0.89	236	16	2	64	109	45	19	10	2	1	10	6
25108	health-food	j	0.85	246	10	19	154	55	8	6	4	7	1	0	2
25110	posterior	n	0.88	240	6	30	36	27	139	0	5	4	0	0	99