Word Checker 2 - The Brown Corpus

The Brown Corpus was the first of the computer databases used for language analysis. It contains 500 samples of 2000+ words from various texts written in American English from the year 1961. The texts chosen covered a wide variety of subjects and styles, though poetry was excluded- for full details click here.

We have included the 2,000 most frequent words as an indicator of frequency. There have been many changes in language use since the database was compiled, but it does still provide one measure against which we judge a word's frequency.