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From: drenze@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu (Douglas Renze)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Re: word frequency in English
Message-ID: <5408@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
Date: 10 Apr 91 02:05:50 GMT
References: <13834@adobe.UUCP>
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Reply-To: drenze@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu (Douglas Renze)
Organization: U of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
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In article <13834@adobe.UUCP> mjward@adobe.COM (Michael J. Ward) writes:
>Where can I find a list/dictionary/datafile of English words sorted by
>relative frequency in various classes of usage. For example, is "a" the most
>commonly used English word. followed by "the"? How about "that" compared to
>"sesquipedalianism"? Who's doing binary lookup tables based on word
>frequency?  --Mike Ward

Well, I could be totally off base, but have you checked any linguistics text-
books or textbooks written to teach English to non-native english speakers?  I'd
almost say that the latter is more likely to be of help, because language texts
usually teach the basic 500 (or whatever) words in a language first.

Hope this helps, but I doubt it.