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Publisher: Routledge, London and New York, NY, 2009, £75/$135 (hbck); £19.99/$55.95 (pbck).
ISBN: 978 0 415 77530 4 (hbck); 0 415 77531 1 (pbck)
Language learning is a huge industry around the world and so an attractive market for publishers. Routledge have introduced a series of frequency dictionaries, with the aim of identifying which words are most used in a language and thus, they believe, the words that learners are most likely to encounter in the "real world". This idea has developed from research into English, which found that the 4,000-5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 per cent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 per cent of speech. It is certainly an attractive proposition to have a list of the words one is most likely to need...