If you're like me, you've wasted time taking online quizzes like the one my friend challenged me to take: Name the 100 most frequently used English words in five minutes. (I got 45.)

You could waste all the time you'd like, as Top 100 word lists abound. Word-frequency rankings are part -- albeit just a sliver -- of the vast output from studies of language corpora, or large collections of written and sometimes spoken text. Researchers parse such data to help make sense of our ever-evolving language.

But...