And Counting

I've been spending some time lately at WordCount, which presents an elegantly designed interface to the 86,800 most frequently used English words.

The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find.

Some will surprise you. Reading between the rankings 12913 and 12923, for example, will reveal that Staffordshire constables are untidy and thicker than (their colleagues?) in Bombay, for example. "Gasp! Wha?", you cry. But it's true. Why, they couldn't even catch the Interfering Manhattan Buckets Killers.
WordCount gets its data from a very interesting source: the British National Corpus,

a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.

A free simple search version of this amazing resource is available online, and works very well as, among other things, a finder of randomly recondite information, drawing as it does from sources as diverse as the novels of Ruth Rendell, The Railway Station: A Social History, and Rabbiting by Bob Smithson, among many others.