Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English

based on the British National Corpus

Geoffrey Leech, Paul Rayson, Andrew (All Of Lancaster University) Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138151314
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317882046
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Linguistics

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English is a landmark volume in the development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have in general given frequency information about the written language only, this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the differences between spoken and written English, and between different spoken and written varieties of the language. The frequencies are derived from a wide ranging and up-to-date corpus of English: the British National Corpus, which was compiled from over 4,000 written texts and spoken transcriptions representing the present day language in the UK. The book is based on a new version of the corpus (available from 2001) providing more accurate grammatical information, which is essential (for example) for distinguishing words like leaves (noun) and leaves (verb) with different meanings. The book begins with a general introduction, explaining why such information is important and highlighting interesting linguistic findings that emerge from the statistical analysis of the British National Corpus vocabulary. It also contains twenty four 'interest boxes' which highlight and comment on different aspects of frequency - for example, the most common colour words in English in order of frequency, and a comparison of male words (e.g. man) and female words (e.g. woman) in terms of their frequency.

List 1.1. Alphabetical frequency list for the whole corpus (lemmatized)

Word	=	Word type (headword followed by any variant forms)—see pp. 4–5
PoS	=	Part of speech (grammatical word class)—see pp. 12–13
Freq	=	Rounded frequency per million word tokens (down to a minimum of 10 occurrences of a lemma per million)—see p. 5
Ra	=	Range: number of sectors of the corpus (out of a maximum of 100) in which the word occurs
Di	=	Dispersion value (Juilland’s D) from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100.

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A selection of antonyms

Adjectives are often paired with another adjective as antonyms. The most common combination of antonyms is new (1154 per million) and old (648 per million), but in this case there is also a third term, young (379 per million) which contrasts with old when referring to living beings. Other common pairs of antonyms are (frequencies per million words):

...

good	1276	bad	264
high	574	low	286
large	471	small	518
early	353	late	302
long	392	short	177
big	338	little	306
full	289

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Symbols and abbreviations
• List of interest boxes
• Foreword
• Explanatory notes on words marked * in the lists
• Introduction
• 1. Frequencies in the Whole Corpus (Spoken and Written English)
• 2. Spoken and Written English
• 3. Two Main Varieties of Spoken English Compared
• 4. Two Main Varieties of Written English Compared
• 5. Rank Frequency Lists of Words within Word Classes (Parts of Speech)
• 6. Frequency Lists of Grammatical Word Classes (based on the Sampler Corpus)