Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English

Companion Website for: Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus.

Geoffrey Leech, Paul Rayson, Andrew Wilson
(2001) pp. 320, Longman, London. ISBN 0582-32007-0 (Paperback)

Books of English word frequencies have in the past suffered from severe limitations of sample size and breadth. They have also tended to be restricted to word forms alone. Most importantly, almost all have dealt only with written language. This book overcomes these limitations. It is derived from the British National Corpus - a 100,000,000 word electronic databank sampled from the whole range of present-day English, spoken and written - and makes use of the grammatical information that has been added to each word in the corpus.

Includes frequencies for present-day speech (including everyday conversation) as well as for writing

• Rank-ordered and alphabetical frequency lists for the whole corpus and for various subdivisions: e.g. informative vs. imaginative writing, conversational vs. other varieties of speech
• Entries take account of grammatical parts of speech (e.g. round as a preposition is listed separately from round as an adjective)
• Includes discussions of a number of thematic frequency lists such as colour terms, female vs. male terms, etc

This companion website provides:

• List of texts and their categories
• The frequency lists
  These lists are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
• Back cover of the book as an image and text.
• Downloadable samples from the book: (these files are PDF format, you can download a free Acrobat Reader from adobe.com)
  • Contents page
  • Foreword
  • Explanatory notes on words marked * in the frequency lists
  • Page 47 - "Frequency of names of days" interest box
  • Page 120 - first page of "List 1.2. Rank frequency list for the whole corpus"
  • Page 130 - "Frequency of contracted verbs have and be" interest box
  • Page 218 - first page of "List 2.4. Distinctiveness list contrasting speech and writing"
  • Page 244 - "Interjections, discourse markers and fillers" interest box
  • Page 287 - "Adjectives for regions and nations" interest box
  • Page 301 - "List 6.3.1. Alphabetical list of grammatical word classes: conversation v. task-oriented speech"

Based on the British National Corpus:

The frequency data is based on the British National Corpus. The BNC project was carried out and is managed by an industrial/academic consortium lead by Oxford University Press, of which the other members are major dictionary publishers Addison-Wesley Longman and Larousse Kingfisher Chambers; academic research centres at Oxford University Computing Services, Lancaster University's Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, and the British Library's Research and Innovation Centre.

Review of this book:

This book has been reviewed in the Language Awareness Journal:

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus. Hunston, Susan (Review of: Leech, Geoffrey; Rayson, Paul; Wilson, Andrew), Language Awareness, 2002, 11, 2, 152-157. Direct link: http://www.multilingual-matters.net/la/011/0143/la0110143.pdf