English word frequency lists

We are providers of high-quality frequency word lists in English (and many other languages). The lists are generated from an enormous authentic database of text (text corpora) produced by real users of English. Our largest English corpus contains texts with a total length of 40,000,000,000 words.

Data quality

A relatively small corpus is sufficient to generate a list of the 2,000 most frequent English words, or the list of 3,000 words or 5,000 words because such words appear frequently enough in any text.

However, an enormous text database (corpus) is required to ensure reliable word frequency information even for rare and infrequently used words. The only viable option of building corpora of billions of words is using an automatic procedure of downloading content from the web. Lexical Computing developed a sophisticated procedure for collecting only linguistically valuable content from the web. A series of tools is used to focus on the right content and to perform deduplication and cleaning. This ensures that the statistics are not skewed. This blog post gives more details.

Wordlist size

We are able to generate frequency lists of millions of unique words in English. The actual size depends on the specifications. By default, we will not include any word which appears fewer than 5 times in the corpus. Such words are typically noise without any linguistic value. The client can specify any filtering options.

Enriched frequency wordlists

We are also able to provide additional information such as POS tags, lemmas, probabilities of the next word, or any other statistics or morphological information.

Regional varieties

The frequency list can be generated from the whole corpus or only from its parts. Each document in the corpus carries information about the top-level domain (TLD) from which it was downloaded, for example .ca, .us or .uk. This information can be used to generate frequency lists of regional varieties of English.

Wordlist sample

The easiest is to register a free trial account in Sketch Engine and use the wordlist tool to generate a wordlist. The advanced tab of the wordlist tool allows for detailed specifications to be used.

Wordlist prices

We will provide a quotation based on the exact specifications and the intended use of the wordlist.

Wordlist download

The corpus will be made for download to you on a dedicated link within the agreed period of time. It normally takes a week or two to generate the data. Very complex wordlist can be computationally demanding and can take longer to produce.

English word frequency list

A random sample of words from the frequency list of English word forms with part-of-speech tags. The list can be delivered in the required format and supplemented with statistical, morphological and other linguistic information.

English frequency list

English word frequency list sample

Download a spreadsheet with a sample of the last 100 words in each thousand between 1,000 and 100,000. The list is case sensitive. Lists with specific criteria and filtering options can be generated to your requirements.