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Corpus-based frequency and collocation information from WordAndPhrase.info

Mark Davies, creator of the largest freely available corpus of English, has built another tool, called WordAndPhrase.info. What does it do? You type in an English word and it shows you the following information:

  • the word’s rank in the COCA corpus (for example, perform is the 954th most frequent word in the corpus)
  • the word’s relative frequency in spoken English, fiction, magazines, newspapers and academic texts; for example, sullen (=angry and silent) is used almost exclusively in fiction writing and practically never in spoken English
  • collocates, sorted by part of speech and by frequency; for example, perform often occurs together with words such as task, function, well, better, able and poorly
  • example sentences containing the word

If you type * into the search box, you can also get a list of the most frequent English words.

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