Sharing Nicely

A little online gem that fits well with my interest in fat-tail (related to what some call long-tail) distributions and small world networks (not zefrank’s kind). WordCount is in a way a graphic representation of the fact that the English language is a small world.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. WordCount 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 was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself.

Use it for fun and track down unique sequences of words. How is this for a bit of politics: words ranked 3046-3051 spell out “iraq winner, fucking smooth, nick votes” … or “america ensure oil opportunity” … You can mail in the best sequence you find (to jjh at number27 dot org). A collection of nice ones is here.