Words at work

Did you know that 1000 words cover 70% of all written text in English? Take that to 2000 and you get 80% coverage. It’s quite impressive isn’t it? I am suddenly feeling the task of teaching English to my daughter got a little lighter.

So, which are the words that we commonly use? Spoken words are easy to spot – especially if you are at the receiving end of a boring lecture. That used to be one of my favourite pass-time during college days and I remember counting 84 'do-you-get-what-I-am-saying's during a history lecture.

Word-spotting as it turns out, is lot easier and more scientific now a days. I recently stumbled up on this amazing tool called Wordle that generates “word clouds” for any text that you feed the engine. You could point it to a webpage or just copy and paste any text and it transforms what appears to be a random set of words into a work of art. The size of each word represents how prominently they are featured in the original text.

The image above is one such wordle based on all the blogs that I have written so far. As you can see, lot of what I write is about Smera, my one year old and her antics. I also seem to have some kind of fascination towards the word “back”, that feature very prominently  – back from, way back, back home, years back, set-back, step-back, turn back and a lot more.

Time to look ahead, I guess.