Words & Numbers

Being a blogger and a financial analyst makes me interested in both words and numbers. So, what site would be better than Word Count. It's a stupid little site but kind of fun to poke around on. Basically, they've taken the 86,800 most common english words and ranked them by how often they are used. So, you can plug in a word and see where it ranks and therefore, how common it is in relation to other words.

Then they created a separate page that ranks all of the same words based upon how often people query that word. As you would expect, the most queried words are not appropriate for work.

Here's kind of a weird thing...on Word Count, "Montpelier" is ranked 54,159 but on Query Count, "Montpelier" is ranked 29,695. That means "Montpelier" is more commonly queried than used. Who the hell besides a dork like me is querying "Montpelier? I guess there's a lot of fellow dorks in town.

By the way, if you aren't tired of words and numbers, you can head on over to Trendio. Trendio is a "for fun" online stock exchange where you trade shares in words rather than companies. As a word becomes more widely used in 3,000 media websites, it's value increases (and vice versa). So, you make money by correctly predicting what words are going to become trendy and which ones are "so yesterday". I think buying heavily into "Gnarls" right now would be a good bet.

Magnetic Fields | All My Little Words (courtesy of Moistworks)