Comments on: ranking words

By: Stefanie

Stefanie — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:12:37 +0000

Very interesting analysis even if stats are unreliable it still provides a fascinating snapshot.

By: verbivore

verbivore — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:50:13 +0000

Bhadd – gave me a laugh as well!

Caveblogem – I had a lot of fun looking at the Wordcount site yesterday. Just a fascinating project. And I’ll certainly be looking in at your site from now on!

Litlove – I certainly wouldn’t want to base a dissertation on the rankings provided on wordcount but it was fun to cull some ‘trivia’ from their list of words and just get a general sense of what we write says about our culture. And thank you, I’m glad you liked it!

By: litlove

litlove — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:14:17 +0000

Isn’t it fun to have a look, though, caveats about statistics notwithstanding! I thought this was a wonderful post, Verbivore, and so very enjoyable!

By: caveblogem

caveblogem — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:04:03 +0000

Thanks for your kind comments on my post and such. I had forgotten all about wordcount and you reminded me that I shouldn’t. It is a very interesting site. I had been coding my own information for parts of speech, but I see that they make this information available through the CLAWS word-tagging system. My tagging system differs a little, of course. When I provide input to the Haiku-writing algorithm, for example, I have to treat certain word groups together, otherwise it will not know whether to use an article in front of certain nouns. But it will still save me a great deal of time. And it is really cool.

Your blog is very interesting, too. And I plan on coming back to visit often.

By: verbivore

verbivore — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:14:00 +0000

I completely agree and forgot to put anything about my own skepticism into the post. I realize that most of these rankings are probably not hard and fast at all. But it was so much fun to browse and search!

By: Brian Hadd

Brian Hadd — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:48:08 +0000

Time conquistador, bunkum. I he he!

By: Dew

Dew — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:22:23 +0000

I’m very suspicious of statistics in general and might quibble with some of these. For example, maybe we say no more than yes because we like to say yeah, uh-huh, mm-hmm and so forth. There’s also nope and nuh-uh, but I’m pretty sure that yeah is used way more often. If we combined yeah and yes, what rank would that be?

As far as I, maybe we say that so much because we like to temper our opinions. We don’t so much like saying, “This book is awful!” We prefer to say, “I think this book…” or “I would say this book….” and so on.

But what a fun post! I’m heading over right now to check out wordcount.