Updated 2009/02/10
This page has my own word lists, but look here for other lists.
Just for fun (or seriousness...)
"Word Count 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.
The lists
It may be best to read this first before downloading as they may not be what you want.
There are four sets of lists so choose carefully.
Set A) a list of the 2000 most frequent words from a variety of sources. This list is based on range, which means how frequently it appears in a wide variety of texts
Set B) The word lists that are part of Paul Nation's Range program (used with permission). These are (almost) pure frequency only lists. Note that the content of this list is different from the lists mentioned above but most are the same.
Set C) Two lists of words for "academic" study, i.e. as preparation for getting into university
Set D) There is also a lemmatized list of the first 2000 words (headwords only) for students to learn from.
Frequency list of multi-word units
Want to make your own lists?
LexTutor is a great site
Then Mike Barlow's website is the best there is.
You may want to try Wordsmith Tools or MonoConc as two windows programs for analyzing large corpora.
Try Range by Nation and Heatley. It allows you to see how many words are used in each of several texts.
Or Lawrence Anthony's programs for concordancing and making lists
SAVING THE FILES
In your web browser click on the file you want and the text will
spill out onto your page, then choose 'save' from the file menu
(or wherever it is) and save the file to disk. I advise saving
it as 'text'.
Each list combines all the words at that level alphabetically NOT numerically. There are several lists. They are the same set of 2000 words but broken into segments:
The full 2000
Various subgroups
501-1000 1-1000
1001-2000 1001-1500
1501-2000
* The headword only lists, and
* The headword with word family lists.
Those that list the headwords only list only the headword of the
main family such as 'able', but not 'ably', 'unable', etc.
Example:
A
Able
About
Above
Accept
....
To get the first one thousand most common words in English list
click here. (Words 1-1000). Note that it
is not exactly one thousand as some numbers and so on have been
omitted.
To get the second one thousand most common words in English list
click here. (Words 1001-2000 or thereabouts).
Those that list many of the word family members will have the
affixes - not not all combinations are covered and you will find
gaps. You should of course note that each family member which
has a different frequency have been put under one heading. I'm
not sure if the frequency count Paul used was a sum of all the
word family members or just the frequency of the headword. Either
way you should be aware of that.
Example:
A
An
Able
Ability
Abler
Ablest
Ably
Unable
About
Above
Accept
Acceptability
Acceptable
Acceptance
Accepted
Accepting
Accepts
...
...
To get the first one thousand (words 1-1000) most common words
in English list complete with word families click here.
Note that it is not exactly one thousand as some numbers and so
on have been omitted.
To get the second one thousand most common words in English (words
1001 -2000) with their word families click here. The
word families broadly contain inflections with a few derivatives thrown in for
good measure.
The Academic word list written by Averil Coxhead is
here.
It effectively replaces the University Wordlist. The University Word List was a list of words often found in academic
texts, but does not exactly take off from the end of the second
thousand most frequent word list.
To get the old University Word List with word families click here.
(About 800 headwords)
Go to the Vocabulary Frequency Lists.
Go to the Vocabulary Reference database
Go to the Main Vocabulary index