What website will give me the frequency of a word in the English language?

Question

Is there a website that will give me a frequency of a word in the English language?
I am looking for some thing like this: I would type in the word, and it would give me a frequency rating.

I have seen one before that had something like 80,000 words, but I just can't seem to find it anymore.

Update: 
I think the problem with these frequency lists is that they are not accurate enough, because some words are also used as Proper Nouns, and that skews the numbers. For example, the word "bracken" is rarely used in its original meaning "fern", but it is frequently used as a last name. If you take that into consideration, then you can see a more accurate number.

RegDwigнt · Accepted Answer

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) have frequencies for all words rather than just 80000. And they are professionally compiled and regularly updated corpora, rather than something for which you don't even know the source or date.

If you are looking for lists of words sorted by frequency, COCA has that, too. They have a free 5000-word frequency list, and a 100000-word frequency list that's available for a fee, and some lists in-between.

Ed Max · Answer

The referenced website is defunct. This answer is out of date.

What you are looking for is the wonderful site wordcount.org.  Enjoy.

About Wordcount
Wordcount is a visualization of the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words [...]

Wordcount data currently comes from the British
National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written
and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to
represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage.
Wordcount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In
the future, Wordcount will be modified to track word usage within any
desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

Rajesh · Answer

This is irrelevant to the question, but it's a simple and useful tool.Type the word or phrase you are interested in google's search box with quotes.

For example, "duplicity".

The number of search results which are displayed below the search bar is a nice indication of the frequency of the particular word in web.

Erik Aronesty · Answer

I put this together a json file derived from google's N-gram corpus. Raw data for is here:

http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html

Data has been ascii-ized, cases were merged and the number is the word count:.  These are 58600 of the most frequent words with a cutoff of 1553 mentions in the corpus.    (The original purpose was search query normalization)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/earonesty/dotfiles/master/frequent.js

What website will give me the frequency of a word in the English language?

4 Answers

The referenced website is defunct. This answer is out of date.

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