@Chewy: (Gesundheit) I just love the quiz. The alphabetical order makes this a real challenge because you can start with "a" then try to find a word just after the last word in the list of ten. A great, great quiz.
But I'm highly skeptical on the source.
As you mentioned, "fun" didn't make the list. I've seen the list before and it also seemed exceptionally weird that "king" made the top 1000, but "queen" doesn't make the top 2000.
So I did a Google search for alternate "most common word" lists and found this one:
http://www.paulnoll.com/Books/Clear-English/English-3000-common-words.html
Each group of 200 words is arranged alphabetically, so the 200 most common words are listed on the first page, #201-400 on the next page, until all 3000 words on the list are covered. (Note: The list I refer to doesn't have 200 words on each page because "plurals and simple tenses have been removed". So the "top 3000 words" list ends up only 2126 words long.
I decided to pick the list named the "7th and 8th hundred words", (#701-800). You'd expect that every word in the top 800 of one such list would make it to the top 2000 of a different source. But even excluding proper nouns & abbreviations, there are at least 6 words on the list I found that are on not your source: copy, dried, energy, fun, ocean, & seems.
And, BTW, "cat" is in the range 801-1000 on the list I found. |
Common Latin Phrases II 
1st Integer with the Letter... 
Most Common Words (SPORCLE)
