Word frequency data

Most of the information at this website deals with data from the COCA corpus. You might also be interested in the word frequency data from the  14 billion word iWeb corpus.

This site contains what is probably the most accurate word frequency data for English. The data is based on the one billion word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) -- the only corpus of English that is large, up-to-date, and balanced between many genres.

When you purchase the data, you have access to four different datasets, and you can use whichever ones are the most useful for you. Short samples are given below for each of these datasets, and you can also see much more complete samples (every tenth entry), as well as free copies of the top 5,000 entries for each list.

 1  The most basic data shows the frequency of each of the top 60,000 words (lemmas) in each of the eight main genres in the corpus. Unlike word frequency data that is just based on web pages, the COCA data lets you see the frequency across genres, to know if the word is more informal (e.g. blogs or TV and movies subtitles) or more formal (e.g. academic). The following are just a few entries of words at different frequency levels (rank), 1-60,000. 

 2  Another dataset shows the frequency not only in the eight main genres, but also in nearly 100 "sub-genres" (Magazine-Sports, Newspaper-Finance, Academic-Medical, Web-Reviews, Blogs-Personal, or TV-Comedies, etc).

 3  A third dataset shows the frequency of the word forms of the top 60,000 lemmas:

 4  A final dataset shows the top 219,000 words in the billion word corpus -- each word that occurs at least 20 times and in 5 different texts. In this list, the words are not lemmatized (e.g. each form of a word is listed separately from other forms) and the words are not tagged for part of speech. For each word, it shows in which genres it is the most common (again, to show +/- formal) and what percent are capitalized (useful for determining +/- proper noun; see daymond and dentzer below).