I love Found Poems. I love playing Hangman. I will do almost any silly thing to get close to a word that I like. I lose at Scrabble because I get lost in the aesthetics, instead of counting those damn points. I once made a right angle of "SEMEN" and "NUANCE," but I came in dead last.
If you can relate to my word fetish, you are going to LOSE IT when you discover: Wordcount.
Wordcount, is, in their words, "an artistic experiment in the way we use language... It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is."
The fun part is searching for words you like, and then seeing what words fall before and after them. For instance, if you look up "Susie," this is what the string looks like:
susie deftly dandy fundamentalists meek penultimate clowns
Susie is word #22609 and clowns is #22615. Is it not divine?
I liked what happened with my last name, too:
bright jesus rooms russian wild liverpool
That's word #1844 to #1849.
The possibilities are endless and surprising. They've got a devoted group of fans, but I'm sure they could use some more!
Look up your favorite word and sock it to me.
