Wordcount

The British National Corpus contains some hundred million English words derived from a vast range of sources. It's a complete inventory of the English language as used worldwide. All words that occur in this database at least twice—86,800 of them—are adopted into Wordcount, making this an interactive presentation of the core English vocabulary. The words are ordered by frequency of use. It should come as no surprise that the word "the" occupies the top spot, but who would guess that the last word to make the list is "conquistador?" Wordcount has an extremely no-nonsense design. In fact, it's nothing more than a stream of words that invites us to go searching and see what we can turn up. Scrolling back and forth through the words in order reveals a lot about how English is used, and what this says about the people who use it. "Mother" is higher on the list than "father," but "asshole" is much lower than "dick," which in turn ranks higher than "champions" and "populations."