Wordsmost

Wordsmost is a data-driven platform and open knowledge project focused on lexical frequency and usage patterns across languages. It aggregates large-scale text corpora to generate word lists, frequency rankings, and related linguistic statistics, with the aim of helping writers, educators, researchers, and software developers understand common language usage and trends.

Data and methodology: The project collects text from licensed corpora, public-domain sources, and user-contributed datasets, applying normalization, tokenization, and lemmatization. Frequency lists are produced per language and, where possible, per domain (for example, news, literature, or social media). The platform releases updated word lists on a regular cadence and documents provenance and licensing for each dataset.

Features and tools: Wordsmost provides top-word rankings, collocation data, part-of-speech tags, and lemmas. An API and downloadable datasets enable programmatic access, while an interactive explorer allows researchers to filter by language, domain, and time window. The project also maintains citation guidelines and usage notes to support academic work.

History and governance: The concept emerged in 2023 through collaboration among linguists, data scientists, and educators. It operates as an open-source-style project with a community governance model and permissive data licenses where feasible. The project emphasizes transparency in methodology and data sources.

Impact and challenges: Wordsmost is used in linguistics research, education, localization, and UX writing to benchmark vocabulary and measure stylistic choices. Limitations include sampling bias, uneven language coverage, and copyright constraints. Privacy and ethical considerations guide data selection and reporting.