Wordcount is a beautiful squeaky-clean representation of the 86,800 most frequent words in English (data is taken from the British National Corpus).

This is the best representation of a word list I have ever seen. As you can see, the word list is presented as a long horizontal chain. The more common a word in the list, the larger it appears in the chain. The format allows users to:

• Explore the chain by scrolling left and right.
• Type in a word and find its frequency (for example, I found that the word Spam is rated 36,636. This means that in English, there are 36,637 words that are more common than Spam)
• Type in a frequency and find the word that corresponds to it (for example, I found that the 1000th most common word in English is James)

The site looks good and it is easy to use. This means that it is learner-friendly. Here are a couple of ideas for teachers:

1. For homework, give students a list of words, and ask them to find the frequencies of the words and put them in order (from most common to least common). This works well with sets of words - prepositions or question words, for example:

• Which - Rating: 31
• What - Rating: 46
• When - Rating: 49
• Who - rating: 53
• Where - Rating: 91
• How - Rating: 93
• Why - Rating: 166
• Whose - Rating: 475

2. Write coded messages for your students and ask them to use Wordcount to decode them for homework. For example, here is a well-known joke which contains a great infinitive of purpose:

• Question: 166; 70; 1; 4162; 1365; 1; 317?
• Answer: 4; 94; 4; 1; 71; 260

And here is a song line which contains the same grammar point:

• 11; 76; 265; 4; 134; 11; 384; 14