Jonathan Harris, an artist and a designer, hosts WordCount™ at www.wordcount.org, an interactive presentation of the most frequently used English words. According to Harris it is an artistic experiment in the way the English language is used.

He states that WordCount includes the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it, and the smaller the word, the more uncommon it is, he observes.

The WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®. The corpus is 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 includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®.

Harris has designed WordCount with a minimalist aesthetic design so that the details can speak for themselves.

The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sift through words like an archaeologist through sand, and await the unexpected find.

Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about the words themselves and their usage. For instance, "God" is one word, at 376th position, from "began", two words from "start", and six words from "war". And, the word 'devil' occupies the 4802nd position. 'The' tops them all, at the first place, followed by of, and, to and a. The 100th position is held by 'got.' 

Some other interesting sort of comparative rankings: War is at 304 and peace is far away at 1,155! Love beats hate, Coke beats Pepsi and love beats sex by over 1,000. And, 'Serendipity' is ranked 54,660 whereas 'discovery' stands at the 3323rd spot.

When asked whether anything is connecting these words Jonathan Harris remarked "That's what's really interesting, and this is the one aspect of WordCount that people have really gravitated toward, as I've found.

Because the data is essentially random -- I mean, it's not random, but the fact that a given word is next to another word is only based on how often those words appear in normal English usage. But when you have 88,000 words placed back to back, chances are pretty good that a few of those sequences are going to form some pretty conspiratorial meanings. Many, from all over the globe, have reported finding interesting sequences in WordCount. Some of them are 3474-3476 apple formula: imagination, 1941-1945 faith establish facts requires membership. Some of Harris's favourites are words 992 to 995 are 'American ensure oil opportunity.' Then 4304 to 4307 is 'Microsoft acquire salary tremendous.'

The innovative and intuitive design encourages the user to delve into English through searches available by name or rank. Also, one can click on any point along the grey coloured graph to get the display of the appropriate word sought, along with its 'neighbours.'

Some of the results may be a bit dismaying, like the word "love" at 384 totally outranked by the "war" at 304, and both of them overtaken by "time" at the 66th position. The database even has proper nouns listed so that visitors can check to see if their own names are available for frequency of use ranking. 'Gandhi' takes the 9265th spot whereas 'Hitler' occupies the 4775th position. Soon, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.