Word frequency lists

In computational linguistics, a frequency list is a sorted list of words (word types) together with their frequency, where frequency here usually means the number of occurrences in a given corpus. A short example could be: It seems that Zipf's law holds for frequency lists drawn from longer texts of any natural language. Frequency lists are a necessary prerequisite for building of an electronic dictionary, which is by itself a prerequisite for a wide range of applications in computational linguistics.

German linguists define the häufigkeitsklasse (frequency class) $$N$$ of an item in the list using the base 2 logarithm of the ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the most frequent item. The most common item belongs to frequency class 0 (zero) and any item that is approximately half as frequent belongs in class 1. In the example list above, the misspelled word outragious has a ratio of 76/3789654 and belongs in class 16.
 * $$N=\left\lfloor0.5-\log_2\left(\frac{\text{Frequency of this item}}{\text{Frequency of most common item}}\right)\right\rfloor$$

where $$\lfloor\ldots\rfloor$$ is the floor function.