The. Of. And. To. A.

What do these words have to do with anything you say? They're the top five words in the world actually, according to http://www.wordcount.org/ . Interesting web-sites make the Internet worthwhile and WORDCOUNT is definitely one of them.

Words create dialogue, music, poetry, books... all types of arts. WordCount is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. The site holds the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. So how did the web-site designer, Jonathan Harris get his data? it 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®.

Jonathan plans to take this project even further in the future by incorporating tracking of word usage on the Internet. I'm thinking that this would definitely change the ranking a bit.... a la' Britney Spears. The web-site is pretty bare, clean, lots of white space (my kind of site). It's easy to use and allows the visitors to just dig through the words like a researcher. You can start off by seeing where YOU rank, I'm currently 2830 (pretty good for 86,000!) after inquiry and before camp.

http://www.wordcount.org/