Word frequencies in written and spoken English: based on the British National Corpus.

Leech, Geoffrey and Rayson, P. and Wilson, A. (2001) Word frequencies in written and spoken English: based on the British National Corpus. Longman, London. ISBN 0582320070

Abstract

Resulting from inter-disciplinary research with Linguistics, this book addressed limitations of earlier word frequency dictionaries of English, that of sample size and breadth. It supercedes previous landmark volumes from the 1930s and 1960s. We used a large representative corpus (100 million words) of up-to-date written, and importantly, spoken language. The book has been cited within the computational and corpus linguistics communities as well as making impact more widely (ontology literature, psychology, language teaching and HCI). The publication led directly to a new series of frequency dictionaries for major world languages published by Routledge, also co-edited by Rayson.