Mr Poole kindly shared the website wordcount.org with me today. It proclaims itself to be “an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words.” The data set it uses draws on the British National Corpus.
It’s just a bit of fun, really. Try searching for names, for example, and seewhere they rank and what words are ranked alongside for some interesting juxtapositions (McAuley underdogs, for example at 50188 and 5018).
You might like to think about what issues this raises about the very definition of the word ‘word’, and the extent to which any corpus can be said to be representative of the English language as a whole.
Heald English 