Word Count is such a site. It’s an attractive award-winning, reference website dedicated to “the way we use language.” The interactive site allows you to type in a random word, such as “jam” and see how frequently we use that word.
According to Word Count , the word “jam” is the 6,850th most used English word.
That’s interesting, but a bit more useful for us branders is the discovery that relative usage of the word “jam” lies between “conversation” and “laboratories.” With a database of over 86,000 words, there are endless non sequitur combinations of word strings and sequences. Some examples (which might make for some fine band names):
- Accent rabbit nightmare
- Creatures chocolate panic
- Rubber essay rings
Really, it’s hard to stop. Here’s additional information about the site (note from a usage standpoint appears to use a British database):
“ Word Count data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.”
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