: views from the Hill

Thursday, November 18, 2004

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /

Another creation of Jonathan Harris.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

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.


If you think that's neat-o, check out Query Count to see what words people are searching Word Count for. One of Zen's favorite diss words is currently ranked #9.

No comments: