Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 130th episode.

Today's podcast has some numbers and statistics along with the lesson, so I would recommend reading the transcripts

while listening to the show. You can find the transcripts for free by going to www.

.prenuncian.com slash podcast. Today we're going to talk about two-syllable words and some interesting facts about two-syllable

words derived from my frequency dictionary. I don't think I've talked about frequency dictionaries

on this podcast before. A frequency dictionary uses a giant corpus to tell us which words are used most often.

So, what's a corpus?

In the linguistic sense, a corpus is a very large body of texts from a bunch of different sources.

This allows linguists to study which words are being used,

how they're being used, and what other words are used with them.

My favorite frequency dictionary

is Mark Davies and D. Gardner's,

a frequency dictionary of contemporary American English. I like this dictionary because it focuses on American English and uses a corpus of formal

and informal written text and spoken dialogue. Plus, I like that it's really easy to use.

Now, you won't find phonetic transcriptions in this dictionary. It doesn't

tell us how to pronounce a word, and it doesn't provide definitions, so it doesn't tell us the meaning

of the word. It does tell us other words that are often used near a word, the part of speech the word

is being used in, and, most important to me, how frequently we use the word.

I found an interesting chart on the Oxford Dictionary's website about word frequency.

They calculated, based on a corpus, that the 10 most frequently used words make up 25% of the overall words we use in English. This is incredible

because it means that one and four words we use are comprised of the same 10 words.

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