Word frequencies

This is no longer available.

Query syntax

1. To find words with a particular prefix, append an asterisk (``okla*''). To find words with a particular suffix, prepend an asterisk (``*lahoma'').
2. Prepend an at symbol to find an anagram (``@itself''). A wild-card letter may be represented by a question mark (``@?yx''). This can be useful for finding outstanding Scrabble(R) plays (but the dictionary is not a legal Scrabble(R) dictionary).
3. Separate several words with spaces to search multiple terms simultaneously.
4. Capital letters and lower-case letters are equivalent.

Limitations

• Frequencies come from a corpus of about 90 million words of written British English. American spellings and informal words will be unexpectedly rare.
• The dictionary can fuel a millennium of word-a-day calendars without repetition: It contains over 366000 words.
• Conjugations, plurals, and tenses of words are separated.
• The dictionary may include some nonwords.
• Hypenated words are generally omitted.
• Queries cannot (yet) handle pronunciation. Use Doug Beeferman's rhyming dictionary to find rhymes.
• Queries cannot (yet) handle substring queries.
• Only the top twenty words are (currently) available per query.

Related links

Dictionaries

• Dictionary and thesaurus (Bennett Yee)
• Reverse dictionary (Casey Faber and Los Alamos Laboratories)
• Name frequencies (U S Census Bureau)
• Rhyming dictionary (Doug Beeferman)
• Anagrams (Anug Garg)

Weird word trivia

• The hundred most frequent words
• Words ending in ``gry'' (Doug Beeferman again)
• Some word frequency differences in age and gender groups (Mary Hodges)
• Homophones (Evan Antworth)
• Homographs (Jon Vahsholtz),
• ``Antagonyms'' (Jonathan Ellis),
• More trivia (Dave Mellinger)

Acknowledgements

Although Carl Burch wrote the program, it is really a conglomeration of many people's work:

• Inspiration: Doug Beeferman's rhyming dictionary and the Census Bureau's name frequencies
• Word lists: many sources discovered by Doug Rohde, including the CMU AI repository, established by Mark Kantrowitz.
• Word frequencies: Adam Kilgarrif's word frequency list, based on the The British National Corpus
• Computing facilities: Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science