Since then, I've received several queries about the reference to the work.
So here it is, though perhaps not very accurate:
The Word Frequency Book
John Carroll
The American Heritage Dictionary (?)
1971 (?)
The American Heritage Intermediate Dictionary Corpus is a collection of
about five million words of American school textbook English. The
publication referred to above is mainly Carroll's frequency study of the
material, which includes the following statistics:
D: Index of cross-category distribution
U: Adjusted frequency of occurrence according to D
F: Raw frequency
SFI: Standard frequency index
Along with these are Fs broken down into subject groups. The lists are
arranged according to U.
I've done a program for the PC which calculates these figures. The required
input includes the desired set of alphabetical lists with raw frequencies. I
also have a set of programs that generate alphabetical and ranked frequency
lists. These programs are available at a cost. Mail me if you are interested.
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Alex Chengyu Fang E-Mail: ucleacf@ucl.ac.uk
Survey of English Usage Voice: 0171 380 7777 Ext. 3120
University College London 0171 419 3120
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT Fax: 0171 916 2054
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