Date: 17-Feb-2010
From: Mark Davies <mark_davies byu.edu>
Subject: COCA Frequency Lists of English
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We have recently placed online free frequency lists that are based on the
400 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is
the only large, up-to-date, genre-balanced corpus of American English that
is publicly available. The free lists contain the top 5000 lemmas in
American English, along with part of speech and frequency, and they can be
downloaded from:
http://www.wordfrequency.info/
In addition to these lists, the site has other word lists that contain:
- Frequency-ranked lists of the top 20,000 lemmas/words in English
- 20-30 collocates (nearby words) for each entry, which give valuable
insight into meaning and usage (up to 300 collocates per word are possible
in some versions)
- Synonyms (for most words), which give additional insight into meaning
- Indications of genre variation (e.g. more frequent in spoken, fiction, or
academic)
- Other frequency and distributional information
Three examples - from among 20,000 in the expanded frequency lists - are
the following (note that there is no formatting in this Linguist List posting):
1421 blow v
[noun] wind, whistle, air, nose, smoke, breeze, face, hair, kiss, head,
window, horn, candle, mind, storm [misc] away, through, across
[out] candle, window, breath, air, wind, smoke, knee, tire, match [up]
building, plot, bomb, plane, car, bridge, wind, threaten [off] steam, head,
roof, leg
** whoosh, gust, waft, puff || move, propel, drive, carry
27254 | 0.94 F
10129 shimmering j
[noun] light, water, heat, hair, sun, sea, surface, silver, glass, wave,
color [misc] blue, white, across, above, green, golden, wear, red, dark,
rise, yellow, beyond
** iridescent, sparkling, shining, gleaming, glistening, glittering
1555 | 0.90 F
18669 pathos n
[adj] Greek, tragic, deep, full, human, genuine, pure, sympathetic, comic,
final [noun] humor, tragedy, comedy, sense, appeal, suffering, emotion,
ethos, scene [verb] evoke, reflect, avoid, generalize, capture, experience,
arouse
** sadness, bleakness, despair, tragedy, anguish
473 | 0.90 A
For more information on these frequency lists, please visit
http://www.wordfrequency.info/.
Linguistic Field(s): Lexicography; Text/Corpus Linguistics
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