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Word Frequency List of American English
Mark Davies and Dee Gardner
© 2010
These are entries 1-20,000 from the frequency lists that are available from www.wordfrequency.info.
They are based on the 400+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is the
only large, recent, and genre-balanced corpus of American English. Due to the characteristics of the
corpus on which the data is based, you can be sure that the words that you find here are ones that you
would encounter in the "real world". Because the entries are arranged in order of frequency, you can
maximize your study of English vocabulary in a way that is probably not available with any other
resource.
Other frequency lists are available from www.wordfrequency.info, including 5,000 and 10,000 word lists
that have the same format as this one. In addition, it is possible to purchase frequency and collocates
lists that contain 200-300 collocates for each word (compared to the 20-30 here), for a total of about
5,000,000 collocates for the 20,000 word list. Unlike this PDF version, the expanded collocates lists allow
you to edit, copy from, and print from the files. On the other hand, those versions are not formatted as
nicely as what you have here, they are more expensive, and they are designed mainly for use by
(computational) linguists.
In addition to the frequency lists, you can also purchase complete 2-gram and 3-gram lists from the
entire 400 million word corpus, containing more than 100 million n-grams. You can also purchase a
printed (book) version of the entries 1-5,000, which was published by Routledge in 2010 as the
Frequency Dictionary of American English: word sketches, collocates, and thematic lists. (Note that this
list has about 30-40% fewer collocates for the words 1-5,000 than in the printed book, because of a
copyright agreement with Routledge in which we promised not to duplicate the contents of the book.)
Finally, a note on accuracy. We believe that the frequency list itself (the words #1-5,000, 10,000 or
20,000) is very accurate -- probably more so than any other frequency list of English. In addition, the
more than 100,000 collocates for words 1-5,000 have been corrected manually, although there are
undoubtedly a few remaining problems. There are more than 250,000 collocates for the 10,000 word list
and more than 500,000 collocates for the 20,000 word list. Because of the number of collocates, these
have not been checked individually for accuracy, although many efforts have been made to correct the
list as a whole.
If you would like to see detailed information on the composition of the corpus, and details on exactly
how the frequency list was created (tokenization, part of speech tagging, lemmatization, frequency and
dispersion calculations, extracting collocates, etc), please see the introductory material in the book
sample.
Thank you for purchasing this frequency list. We hope that it will be a useful tool for you in your study,
teaching, and research of English.
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