COMPARE TO OTHER ONLINE DICTIONARIES AND THESAURUSES

Most online dictionaries and thesauruses just have long lists of definitions or synonyms. But with these other resources, there is no indication of either 1) which words are more common or 2) which ones are used more in different types of speech or writing (e.g. academic writing, newspapers, fiction, or spoken). Without this frequency data, there is really no way to choose among the many different synonyms or to craft the language for a particular genre.

WordAndPhrase.Info, on the other hand, is completely frequency based. For example, take the word strong. Look at the synonyms list on the left (and you'll have to back up one page to come back to this page). The synonyms are grouped by word sense (as with other resources), but here they also show you which of these synonyms are more common. And as you click on these, you'll see how frequent they are in different genres. For example, persuasive and compelling are most common in academic, while spicy and pungent are most common in magazines / newspapers and fiction (again, you'll have to back up a back or two to get back here). We can therefore see that we would probably not refer to a spicy argument (i.e. strong argument) in an academic paper or talk about a compelling aroma (i.e. strong aroma) in a short story. The frequency data is the key to everything -- it lets us know what is really happening in the language -- and not just what could happen, based on artificial dictionary or thesaurus entries.

MIILIONS OF WORDS?

And what about the claim by other sites that they have millions of words? First of all, do they mean millions of unique words in the dictionary? Probably not -- there aren't that many words in English. And how do they define what a word is? Are swim, swims, swam, and swum four separate words? What about nice, nicer, and nicest? Finally, what about proper nouns -- Chicago, Alex, Beethoven, NATO, and Yellowstone?

Our list is based on the top 60,000 lemmas in English, so the lemma swim includes the four forms swim, swims, swam, and swum, and nice also includes nicer and nicest. It also does not include proper nouns -- they typically don't belong in a frequency list.

And yet, isn't 60,000 words a little small? No, it isn't. In fact, there is no other accurate frequency list of English that is this large. Once you get down to words 50,000-60,000 in the frequency list, you really are dealing with either extremely infrequent words, or compound words. For example, in the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) -- the corpus on which our data is based -- the following are some of the (non-hyphenated) adjectives in the range 56,000-56,500:

cholinergic (word number 56013 in our list), airworthy (56069), epiphenomenal (56071), conceptualized (56123), westering (56134), fluky (56152), dysplastic (56162), molting (56205), triploid (56217), parthenogenetic (56254), beaky (56294), subclavian (56335), ungrazed (56340), volar (56376), epigrammatic (56421), emetic (56433), outflung (56468), hadronic (56482), and scuttling (56517).

And the following are some of the hyphenated (i.e. compound) adjectives in the same range -- most of which can be understood by look at their constituent parts:

end-of-season (56003), minute-to-minute (56004), housing-related (56024), single-edge (56031), post-debate (56042), slit-eyed (56061), big-dollar (56073), long-wearing (56085), best-prepared (56096), anti-gravity (56101), reddish-blond (56104), stop-and-start (56117), spirit-filled (56128), prosperous-looking (56142), fire-related (56183), patched-up (56198), and spit-and-polish (56199)

Do we really need or want a list larger than this? Probably not. Our list is not an abbreviated one by any means, and no accurate list is any larger.